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<a^y  ^^'  >'^'inc 


MAY  8    1897 


DIvis 


No. 


w. 


o 


0 


OCCASIONAL   PAPERS 


OCCASIONAL    PAPERS 


SELECTED  FROM 


THE  GUAEDIAN,  THE  TIMES,  AND 

THE  SATUEDAY  EEVIEW 

1846-1890 


BY    THE    LATE 


E.  W.  CHUECH,  M.A.,  D.C.L. 

SOMETIME  RECTOR   OF  WHATLEY,   DEAN  OF  ST.   PAUL's 
HONORARY   FELLOW  OF  ORIEL  COLLEGE 


IN  TWO  VOLS.— VOL.  II 


ILontion 

MACMILLAN    AND    CO.,  Limited 

NEW  YORK:  THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 
1897 

All  rights  reserved 


CONTENTS 


I 

PAGE 

Mr,  Gladstone  on  the  Royal  Supremacy  .  i 


II 

Joyce  on  Courts  of  Spiritual  Appeal       .  .        21 

III 

Privy  Council  Judgments     .  .  .  .32 

IV 

Sir  John  Coleridge  on  the  Purchas  Case  .        48 

V 

Mr.  Gladstone's  Letter  on  the  English  Church        6^ 

VI 

Disendowment  ......        70 


VI  OCCASIOXAL  PArERS 

VII 

PAGE 

The  Nrw  Court  .....        7S 

VIII 

Mozley's  Bampton  Lectures  .  .82 

IX 
EccE  Homo        ......       133 


X 

The  Author  ok  "Robert   Elsmere  "  on  a  New 

Reformation  .  .180 


XI 
Renan's  "Vie  de  Jesus"        ....       190 

XII 
Renan's  "Les  Apotres"         ....       205 

XIII 
Renan's  IIiiujert  Lectures    ....      222 

XIV 
Renan's  "Souvenirs  d'Enfance"  .       237 


CONTENTS  vii 

XV 

PAGE 

Life  of  Frederick  Robertson  .  .  .      253 

XVI 

Life  of  Baron  Bunsen  ....      273 

XVII 

Coleridge's  Memoir  of  Keble         .  .  .      292 

XVIII 

Maurice's  Theological  EssAys         .  .  .      309 

XIX 

Frederick  Denison  Maurice  .  .  .      320 

XX 

Sir  Richard  Church  .  .  .  .  .327 

XXI 

Death  of  Bishop  Wilberforce        .  .  .      334 

XXII 

Retirement  of  the  Provost  of  Oriel       .  .      343 

XXIII 
Mark  Pattison.  .  .  .  .  -351 


viii  OCCASIONAL  PAPERS 


XXIV 

PAGE 

Pattison's  Essays         .....      357 


XXV 

Bishop  Frazer  ......      373 


XXVI 

Newman's  "Apologia" 


XXXII 
Lord  Blachford 


579 


XXVII 

Dr.  Newman  on  the  "Eirenicon"  .  .      398 

XXVIII 
Newman's  Parochial  Sermons  .  .  441 

XXIX 

Cardinal  Newman       .....      463 

XXX 
Cardinal  Newman's  Course  .  .  470 

XXXI 
Cardinal  Newman's  Naturalness    .  .  479 


483 


MR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL 
SUPREMACY  1 

Mr.  Gladstone  has  not  disappointed  the  confidence 
of  those  who  have  beHeved  of  him  that  when  great 
occasions  presented  themselves,  of  interest  to  the 
Church,  he  would  not  be  found  wanting.  A  statesman 
has  a  right  to  reserve  himself  and  bide  his  time,  and 
in  doubtful  circumstances  may  fairly  ask  us  to  trust 
his  discretion  as  to  when  is  his  time.  But  there  are 
critical  seasons  about  whose  seriousness  there  can  be 
no  doubt.  One  of  these  is  now  passing  over  the 
English  Church.  And  Mr.  Gladstone  has  recognised 
it,  and  borne  himself  in  it  with  a  manliness,  earnest- 
ness, and  temper  which  justify  those  who  have  never 
despaired  of  his  doing  worthy  service  to  the  Church, 
with  whose  cause  he  so  early  identified  himself 

The  pamphlet  before  us,  to  which  he  has  put  his 

^  Remarks  on  the  Royal  Supremacy,  as  it  is  Defined  by  Reason, 
History,  and  the  Constitution.  A  Letter  to  the  Lord  Bishop  of 
London,  by  the  Right  Hon.  W.  E.  Gladstone,  M.P.  for  the 
University  of  Oxford.      Guardian,  loth  July  1850. 

VOL.  II  ^  B 


2     MK.  GLADSTONE  OX  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY     i 

name,  is  the  most  important,  perhaps,  of  all  that  have 
been  elicited  by  the  deep  interest  felt  in  the  matter 
on  which  it  treats.  Besides  its  importance  as  the 
expression  of  the  opinion,  and,  it  must  be  added,  the 
anxieties  of  a  leading  statesman,  it  has  two  intrinsic 
advantages.  It  undertakes  to  deal  closely  and  strictly 
with  those  facts  in  the  case  mainly  belonging  to  the 
period  of  the  Reformation,  on  which  the  great  stress 
has  been  laid  in  the  arguments  both  against  our 
liberty  and  our  very  being  as  a  Church.  And, 
further,  it  gives  us  on  these  facts,  and,  in  connection 
with  them,  on  the  events  of  the  crisis  itself,  the 
judgment  and  the  anticipations  of  a  mind  at  once 
deeply  imbued  with  religious  philosophy,  and  also 
familiar  with  the  consideration  of  constitutional 
questions,  and  accustomed  to  view  them  in  their 
practical  entanglements  as  well  as  in  their  abstract 
and  ideal  forms.  It  is,  indeed,  thus  only  that  the 
magnitude  and  the  true  extent  of  the  relations  of  the 
present  contest  can  be  appreciated.  The  intrinsic 
greatness,  indeed,  of  religious  interests  cannot  receive 
addition  of  dignity  here.  But  the  manner  of  treating 
them  may.  And  Mr.  Gladstone  has  done  what  was 
both  due  to  the  question  at  issue,  and  in  the  highest 
degree  important  for  its  serious  consideration  and  full 
elucidation,  in  raising  it  from  a  discussion  of  abstract 
principles  to  what  it  is  no  less — a  real  problem  of 
English  constitutional  law. 

The  following  passage  will  show  briefly  the  ground 
over  which  the  discussion  travels  ; — - 


I  MR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY  3 

The  questions,  then,  that  I  seek  to  examine  will  be 
as  follow  : — 

1.  Did  the  statutes  of  the  Reformation  involve  the 
abandonment  of  the  duty  of  the  Church  to  be  the 
guardian  of  her  faith  ? 

2.  Is  the  present  composition  of  the  appellate 
tribunal  conformable  either  to  reason  or  to  the  statutes 
of  the  Reformation,  and  the  spirit  of  the  Constitution  as 
expressed  in  them  ? 

3.  Is  the  Royal  Supremacy,  according  to  the  Con- 
stitution, any  bar  to  the  adjustment  of  the  appellate 
jurisdiction  in  such  a  manner  as  that  it  shall  convey  the 
sense  of  the  Church  in  questions  of  doctrine  ? 

All  these  questions  I  humbly  propose  to  answer  in 
the  negative,  and  so  to  answer  them  in  conformity  with 
what  I  understand  to  be  the  principles  of  our  history  and 
law.  My  endeavour  will  be  to  show  that  the  powers  of 
the  State  so  determined,  in  regard  to  the  legislative 
office  of  the  Church  (setting  aside  for  the  moment  any 
question  as  to  the  right  of  assent  in  the  laity),  are  powers 
of  restraint ;  that  the  jurisdictions  united  and  annexed  to 
the  Crown  are  corrective  jurisdictions ;  and  that  their  exer- 
cise is  subject  to  the  general  maxim,  that  the  laws  ecclesi- 
astical are  to  be  administered  by  ecclesiastical  judges. 

Mr.  Gladstone  first  goes  into  the  question — What 
was  done,  and  what  was  the  understanding  at  the 
Reformation  ?  All  agree  that  this  was  a  time  of  great 
changes,  and  that  in  the  settlement  resulting  from 
them  the  State  took,  and  the  Church  yielded,  a  great 
deal.  And  on  the  strength  of  this  broad  general  fact, 
the  details  of  the  settlement  have  been  treated  with 


4  MR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY  i 

an  a  priori  boldness,  not  deficient  often  in  that  kind 
of  precision  which  can  be  gained  by  totally  putting 
aside  inconvenient  or  perplexing  elements,  and  having 
both  its  intellectual  and  moral  recommendations  to 
many  minds  ;  but  highly  undesirable  where  a  great 
issue  has  been  raised  for  the  religion  of  millions,  and 
the  political  constitution  of  a  great  nation.  Men  who 
are  not  lawyers  seem  to  have  thought  that,  by  taking 
a  lawyer's  view,  or  what  they  considered  such,  of 
the  Reformation  Acts,  they  had  disposed  of  the 
question  for  ever.  It  was,  indeed,  time  for  a 
statesman  to  step  in,  and  protest,  if  only  in  the  name 
of  constitutional  and  political  philosophy,  against  so 
narrow  and  unreal  an  abuse  of  law-texts — documents 
of  the  highest  importance  in  right  hands,  and  in  their 
proper  place,  but  capable,  as  all  must  know,  of  leading 
to  inconceivable  absurdity  in  speculation,  and  not 
impossibly  fatal  confusion  in  fact. 

The  bulk  of  this  pamphlet  is  devoted  to  the 
consideration  of  the  language  and  effect,  legal  and 
constitutional,  of  those  famous  statutes  with  the  titles 
of  which  recent  controversy  has  made  us  so  familiar. 
Mr.  Gladstone  makes  it  clear  that  it  does  not  at  all 
follow  that  because  the  Church  conceded  a  great  deal, 
she  conceded,  or  even  was  expected  to  concede, 
indefinitely,  whatever  might  be  claimed.  She  conceded, 
but  she  conceded  by  compact; — a  compact  which 
supposed  her  power  to  concede,  and  secured  to  her 
untouched  whatever  was  not  conceded.  And  she  did 
not  concede,  nor  was  asked  for,  her  highest  power,  her 


1    MR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THfi  ROYAL  SUPREMACY     5 

legislative  power.  She  did  not  concede,  nor  was 
asked  to  concede,  that  any  but  her  own  ministers — by 
the  avowal  of  all  drawing  their  spiritual  authority 
from  a  source  which  nothing  human  could  touch — 
should  declare  her  doctrine,  or  should  be  employed  in 
administering  her  laws.  What  she  did  concede  was, 
not  original  powers  of  direction  and  guidance,  but 
powers  of  restraint  and  correction  ; — under  securities 
greater,  both  in  form  and  in  working,  than  those 
possessed  at  the  time  by  any  other  body  in  England, 
for  their  rights  and  liberties — greater  far  than  might 
have  been  expected,  when  the  consequences  of  a  long 
foreign  supremacy — not  righteously  maintained  and 
exercised,  because  at  the  moment  unrighteously  thrown 
off — increased  the  control  which  the  Civil  Government 
always  must  claim  over  the  Church,  by  the  sudden 
abstraction  of  a  power  which,  though  usurping,  was 
spiritual ;  and  presented  to  the  ambition  of  a  despotic 
King  a  number  of  unwarrantable  prerogatives  which 
the  separation  from  the  Pope  had  left  without  an 
owner. 

On  the  trite  saying,  meant  at  first  to  represent, 
roughly  and  invidiously,  the  effect  of  the  Reforma- 
tion, and  lately  urged  as  technically  and  literally 
true — "  The  assertion  that  in  the  time  of  Henry  VIIL 
the  See  of  Rome  was  both  '  the  source  and  centre  of 
ecclesiastical  jurisdiction,'  and  therefore  the  supreme 
judge  of  doctrine ;  and  that  this  power  of  the  Pope 
was  transferred  in  its  entireness  to  the  Crown  " — Mr. 
Gladstone  remarks  as  follows  : — 


6    im.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY      i 

1  will  not  ask  whether  the  Pope  was  indeed  at  that 
time  the  supreme  judge  of  doctrine  ;  it  is  enough  for  me 
that  not  very  long  before  the  Council  of  Constance  had 
solemnly  said  otherwise,  in  words  which,  though  they 
may  be  forgotten,  cannot  be  annulled.   .   .   . 

That  the  Pope  was  the  source  of  ecclesiastical 
jurisdiction  in  the  English  Church  before  the  Reforma- 
tion is  an  assertion  of  the  gravest  import,  which  ought 
not  to  have  been  thus  taken  for  granted.  .  .  .  The 
fact  really  is  this  : — A  modern  opinion,  which,  by  force 
of  modern  circumstances,  has  of  late  gained  great  favour 
in  the  Church  of  Rome,  is  here  dated  back  and  fastened 
upon  ages  to  whose  fixed  principles  it  was  unknown  and 
alien  ;  and  the  case  of  the  Church  of  England  is  truly 
hard  when  the  Papal  authority  of  the  Middle  Ages  is 
exaggerated  far  beyond  its  real  and  historical  scope,  with 
the  effect  only  of  fastening  that  visionary  exaggeration, 
through  the  medium  of  another  fictitious  notion  of 
wholesale  transfer  of  the  Papal  privileges  to  the  Crown, 
upon  us,  as  the  true  and  legal  measure  of  the  Royal 
Supremacy. 

It  appears  to  me  that  he  who  alleges  in  the  gross 
that  the  Papal  prerogatives  were  carried  over  to  the 
Crown  at  the  Reformation,  greatly  belies  the  laws  and 
the  people  of  that  era.  Their  unvarying  doctrine  was, 
that  they  were  restoring  the  ancient  regal  jurisdiction, 
and  abolishing  one  that  had  been  usurped.  But  there 
is  no  evidence  to  show  that  these  were  identical  in 
themselves,  or  co-extensive  in  their  range.  In  some 
respects  the  Crown  obtained  at  that  period  more  than 
the  Pope  had  ever  had  ;  for  I  am  not  aware  that  the 
Convocation    required    his    license    to    deliberate    upon 


I  MR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY  7 

canons,  or  his  assent  to  their  promulgation.  In  other 
•-aspects  the  Crown  acquired  less  ;  for  not  the  Crown,  but 
the  Archbishop  of  Canterbury  was  appointed  to  exercise 
the  power  of  dispensation  in  things  lawful,  and  to 
confirm  Episcopal  elections.  Neither  the  Crown  nor  the 
Archbishop  succeeded  to  such  Papal  prerogatives  as  were 
contrary  to  the  law  of  the  land  ;  for  neither  the  26th  of 
Henry  VI IL  nor  the  2nd  of  Elizabeth  annexed  to  the 
Crown  all  the  powers  of  correction  and  reformation 
which  had  been  actually  claimed  by  the  Pope,  but  only 
such  as  "  hath  heretofore  been  or  may  lawfully  be  exer- 
cised or  used."  .  .  .  The  "  ancient  jurisdiction,"  and 
not  the  then  recently  claimed  or  exercised  powers,  was 
the  measure  and  the  substance  of  what  the  Crown 
received  from  the  Legislature  ;  and,  with  those  ancient 
rights  for  his  rule,  no  impartial  man  would  say  that  the 
Crown  was  the  source  of  ecclesiastical  jurisdiction 
according  to  the  statutes  of  the  Reformation.  But  the 
statutes  of  the  Reformation  era  relating  to  jurisdiction, 
having  as  statutes  the  assent  of  the  laity,  and  accepted 
by  the  canons  of  the  clergy,  are  the  standard  to  which 
the  Church  has  bound  herself  as  a  religious  society  to 
conform. 


The  word  "jurisdiction"  has  played  an  important 
part  in  the  recent  discussions ;  whether  its  meaning, 
with  its  various  involved  and  associated  ideas,  by  no 
means  free  from  intricacy  and  confusion,  have  been 
duly  unravelled  and  made  clear,  we  may  be  permitted 
to  doubt.  A  distinction  of  the  canonists  has  been 
assumed  by  those  who  have  used  the  word  with  most 


8     MR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY     i 

precision — assumed^  though  it  is  by  no  means  a  simple 
and  indisputable  one.  Mr.  Gladstone  draws  attention 
to  this,  when,  after  noticing  that  nowhere  in  the 
ecclesiastical  legislation  of  Elizabeth  is  the  claim  made 
on  behalf  of  the  Crown  to  be  the  source  of  ecclesias- 
tical jurisdiction,  he  admits  that  this  is  the  language 
of  the  school  of  English  law,  and  offers  an  explanation 
of  the  fact.  That  which  Acts  of  Parliament  do  not 
say,  which  is  negatived  in  actual  practice  by  contra- 
dictory and  irreconcilable  facts,  is  yet  wanted  by 
lawyers  for  the  theoretic  completeness  of  their  idea 
and  system  of  law.  The  fact  is  important  as  a  re- 
minder that  what  is  one  real  aspect,  or,  perhaps,  the 
most  complete  and  consistent  representation  of  a 
system  on  paper,  may  be  inadequate  and  untrue  as  an 
exhibition  of  its  real  working  and  appearance  in  the 
world. 

To  sum  up  the  whole,  then,  I  contend  that  the  Crown 
did  not  claim  by  statute,  either  to  be  of  right,  or  to 
become  by  convention,  the  source  of  that  kind  of  action, 
which  was  committed  by  the  Saviour  to  the  Apostolic 
Church,  whether  for  the  enactment  of  laws,  or  for  the 
administration  of  its  discipline  ;  but  the  claim  was,  that 
all  the  canons  of  the  Church,  and  all  its  judicial  proceed- 
ings, inasmuch  as  they  were  to  form  parts  respectively  of 
the  laws  and  of  the  legal  administration  of  justice  in  the 
kingdom,  should  run  only  with  the  assent  and  sanction  of 
the  Crown.  They  were  to  carry  with  them  a  double 
force — a  force  of  coercion,  visible  and  palpable  ;  a  force 
addressed  to  conscience,  neither  visible  nor  palpable,  and 


I  MR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY  9 

in  its  nature  only  capable  of  being  inwardly  appreciated. 
Was  it  then  unreasonable  that  they  should  bear  outwardly 
the  tokens  of  that  power  to  Avhich  they  were  to  be  in- 
debted for  their  outward  observance,  and  should  work 
only  within  by  that  wholly  different  influence  that  governs 
the  kingdom  which  is  not  of  this  world,  and  flows  im- 
mediately from  its  King  ?  .  .  .  But  while,  according  to 
the  letter  and  spirit  of  the  law,  such  appear  to  be  the 
limits  of  the  Royal  Supremacy  in  regard  to  the  legislative^ 
which  is  the  highest,  action  of  the  Church,  I  do  not  deny 
that  in  other  branches  it  goes  farther,  and  will  now 
assume  that  the  supremacy  in  all  causes,  which  is  at  least 
a  claim  to  control  at  every  point  the  jurisdiction  of  the 
Church,  may  also  be  construed  to  mean  as  much  as  that 
the  Crown  is  the  ultimate  source  of  jurisdiction  of  what- 
ever kind. 

Here,  however,  I  must  commence  by  stating  that,  as 
it  appears  to  me,  Lord  Coke  and  others  attach  to  the  very 
word  jurisdiction  a  narrower  sense  than  it  bears  in 
popular  acceptation,  or  in  the  works  of  canonists — a 
sense  which  excludes  altogether  that  of  the  canonists ; 
and  also  a  sense  which  appears  to  be  the  genuine  and 
legitimate  sense  of  the  word  in  its  first  intention.  Now, 
when  we  are  endeavouring  to  appreciate  the  force  and 
scope  of  the  legal  doctrine  concerning  ecclesiastical  and 
spiritual  jurisdiction,  it  is  plain  that  we  must  take  the 
term  employed  in  the  sense  of  our  own  law,  and  not  in 
the  different  and  derivative  sense  in  which  it  has  been 
used  by  canonists  and  theologians.  But  canonists  them- 
selves bear  witness  to  the  distinction  which  I  have  now 
pointed  out.  The  one  kind  is  Jurisdictio  coactiva  pro- 
pria  dicta,  principibtis   data;    the  other  is  Jurisdictio 


10   .MR.  GLADSTONE  OX  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY    l 

ijupropnc    dicta  ac  mere  spiriiualis^  Ecdesiae  ejusque 
Episcopis  a  CJiristo  data.   .   .   . 

Properly  speaking,  I  submit  that  there  is  no  such 
thing  as  jurisdiction  in  any  private  association  of  men,  or 
anywhere  else  than  under  the  authority  of  the  State. 
/us  is  the  scheme  of  rights  subsisting  between  men  in 
the  relations,  not  of  all,  but  of  civil  society;  a.ndji^ris- 
dictio  is  the  authority  to  determine  and  enunciate  those 
rights  from  time  to  time.  Church  authority,  therefore, 
so  long  as  it  stands  alone,  is  not  in  strictness  of  speech, 
or  according  to  history,  jurisdiction,  because  it  is  not 
essentially  bound  up  with  civil  law. 

But  when  the  State  and  the  Church  came  to  be 
united,  by  the  conversion  of  nations,  and  the  submission 
of  the  private  conscience  to  Christianity — when  the 
Church  placed  her  power  of  self- regulation  under  the 
guardianship  of  the  State,  and  the  State  annexed  its  own 
potent  sanction  to  rules,  which  without  it  would  have 
been  matter  of  mere  private  contract,  \h^njus  or  civil 
right  soon  found  its  way  into  the  Church,  and  the 
respective  interests  and  obligations  of  its  various  orders, 
and  of  the  individuals  composing  them,  were  regulated  by 
provisions  forming  part  of  the  law  of  the  land.  Matter 
ecclesiastical  or  spiritual  moulded  in  the  forms  of  civil 
law,  became  the  proper  subject  of  ecclesiastical  or 
spiritual  jurisdiction,  properly  so  called. 

Now,  inasmuch  as  laws  are  abstractions  until  they  are 
put  into  execution,  through  the  medium  of  executive  and 
judicial  authority,  it  is  evident  that  the  cogency  of  the 
reasons  for  Avelding  together,  so  to  speak,  civil  and 
ecclesiastical  authority  is  much  more  full  with  regard  to 
these  latter  branches  of  power  than  with  regard  to  legis- 


I  MR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY  11 

lation.  There  had  been  in  the  Church,  from  its  first 
existence  as  a  spiritual  society,  a  right  to  govern,  to 
decide,  to  adjudge  for  spiritual  purposes  ;  that  was  a  true, 
self-governing  authority  ;  but  it  was  not  properly  juris- 
diction. It  naturally  came  to  be  included,  or  rather  en- 
folded, in  the  term,  when  for  many  centuries  the  secular 
arm  had  been  in  perpetual  co-operation  with  the  tribunals 
of  the  Church.  The  thing  to  be  done,  and  the  means  by 
which  it  was  done,  were  bound  together ;  the  authority 
and  the  power  being  always  united  in  fact,  were  treated 
as  an  unity  for  the  purposes  of  law.  As  the  potentate 
possessing  not  the  head  but  the  mouth  or  issue  of  a 
river,  has  the  right  to  determine  what  shall  pass  to  or 
from  the  sea,  so  the  State,  standing  between  an  injunc- 
tion of  the  Church  and  its  execution,  had  a  right  to  refer 
that  execution  wholly  to  its  own  authority. 

There  was  not  contained  or  implied  in  such  a  doctrine 
any  denial  of  the  original  and  proper  authority  of  the 
Church  for  its  own  self-government,  or  any  assertion  that 
it  had  passed  to  and  become  the  property  of  the  Crown. 
But  that  authority,  though  not  in  its  source,  yet  in  its 
exercise,  had  immersed  itself  in  the  forms  of  law ;  had 
invoked  and  obtained  the  aid  of  certain  elements  of 
external  power,  which  belonged  exclusively  to  the  State, 
and  for  the  right  and  just  use  of  which  the  State  had  a 
separate  and  independent  responsibility,  so  that  it  could 
not,  without  breach  of  duty,  allow  them  to  be  parted 
from  itself.  It  was,  therefore,  I  submit,  an  intelligible 
and,  under  given  circumstances,  a  warrantable  scheme  of 
action,  under  which  the  State  virtually  said :  Church 
decrees,  taking  the  form  of  law,  and  obtaining  their  full 
and  certain  effect  only  in  that  form,  can  be  executed  only 


12    I^IR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY    i 

as  law,  and  while  they  are  in  process  of  being  put  into 
practice  can  only  be  regarded  as  law,  and  therefore  the 
whole  power  of  their  execution,  that  is  to  say,  all  juris 
diction  in  matters  ecclesiastical  and  spiritual,  must,  accord- 
ing to  the  doctrine  of  law,  proceed  from  the  fountain-head 
of  law,  namely,  from  the  Crown.  In  the  last  legal  resort 
there  can  be  but  one  origin  for  all  which  is  to  be  done  in 
societies  of  men  by  force  of  legal  power ;  nor,  if  so,  can 
doubt  arise  what  that  origin  must  be. 

If  you  allege  that  the  Church  has  a  spiritual  authority 
to  regulate  doctrines  and  discipline,  still,  as  you  choose 
to  back  that  authority  with  the  force  of  temporal  law,  and 
as  the  State  is  exclusively  responsible  for  the  use  of  that 
force,  you  must  be  content  to  fold  up  the  authority  of  the 
Church  in  that  exterior  form  through  which  you  desire  it 
to  take  effect.  From  whatsoever  source  it  may  come 
originally,  it  comes  to  the  subject  as  law ;  it  therefore 
comes  to  him  from  the  fountain  of  law.  .  .  .  The  faith 
of  Christendom  has  been  received  in  England  ;  the  dis- 
cipline of  the  Christian  Church,  cast  into  its  local  form, 
modified  by  statutes  of  the  realm,  and  by  the  common 
law  and  prerogative,  has  from  time  immemorial  been 
received  in  England  ;  but  we  can  view  them  only  as  law, 
although  you  may  look  further  back  to  the  divine  and 
spiritual  sanction,  in  virtue  of  which  they  acquired  that 
social  position,  which  made  it  expedient  that  they  should 
associate  with  law  and  should  therefore  become  law. 

But  as  to  the  doctrine  itself,  it  is  most  obvious  to 
notice  that  it  is  not  more  strange,  and  not  necessarily 
more  literally  real,  than  those  other  legal  views  of  royal 
prerogative  and  perfection,  which    are    the    received 


I  MR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY  13 

theory  of  all  our  great  jurists — accepted  by  them  for 
very  good  reasons,  but  not  the  less  astounding  when 
presented  as  naked  and  independent  truths.  It  was 
natural  enough  that  they  should  claim  for  the  Crown 
the  origination  of  ecclesiastical  jurisdiction,  considering 
what  else  they  claimed  for  it.  Mr.  Allen  can  present 
us  with  a  more  than  Chinese  idea  of  royal  power, 
when  he  draws  it  only  from  Blackstone : — 

They  may  have  heard  [he  says,  speaking  of  the 
"  unlearned  in  the  law "]  that  the  law  of  England  is 
founded  in  reason  and  wisdom.  The  first  lesson  they 
are  taught  will  inform  them,  that  the  law  of  England 
attributes  to  the  King  absolute  perfection,  absolute  im- 
mortality, and  legal  ubiquity.  They  will  be  told  that  the 
King  of  England  is  not  only  incapable  of  doing  wrong, 
but  of  thinking  wrong.  They  will  be  informed  that  he 
never  dies,  that  he  is  invisible  as  well  as  immortal,  and 
that  in  the  eye  of  the  law  he  is  present  at  one  and  the 
same  instant  in  every  court  of  justice  within  his  domin- 
ions. .  .  .  They  may  have  been  told  that  the  royal  pre- 
rogative in  England  is  limited  ;  but  when  they  consult 
the  sages  of  the  law,  they  will  be  assured  that  the  legal 
authority  of  the  King  of  England  is  absolute  and  irresist- 
ible .  .  .  that  all  are  under  him,  while  he  is  under  none 
but  God.   .   .   . 

If  they  have  had  the  benefit  of  a  liberal  education, 
they  have  been  taught  that  to  obtain  security  for  persons 
and  property  was  the  great  end  for  which  men  submitted 
to  the  restraints  of  civil  government ;  and  they  may  have 
heard  of  the  indispensable  necessity  of  an  independent 
magistracy  for  the  due  administration   of  justice ;    but 


14   ]\IR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY    i 

when  they  direct  their  inquiries  to  the  laws  and  constitu- 
tion of  England,  they  will  find  it  an  established  maxim 
in  that  country  that  all  jurisdiction  emanates  from  the 
Crown.  They  will  be  told  that  the  King  is  not  only 
the  chief,  but  the  sole  magistrate  of  the  nation  ;  and  that 
all  others  act  by  his  commission,  and  in  subordination  to 
him.i 

"In  the  most  Hmited  monarchy,"  as  he  says  truly, 
the  "  King  is  represented  in  law  books,  as  in  theory, 
an  absolute  sovereign."  "  Even  now,"  says  Mr.  Glad- 
stone, "after  three  centuries  of  progress  towards 
democratic  sway,  the  Crown  has  prerogatives  by  acting 
upon  which,  within  their  strict  and  unquestioned 
bounds,  it  might  at  any  time  throw  the  country 
into  confusion.  And  so  has  each  House  of  Parlia- 
ment." But  if  the  absolute  supremacy  of  the  Crown, 
in  the  legal  point  of  view  exactly  the  same  over  temporal 
matters  and  causes  as  over  spiritual^  is  taken  by  no 
sane  man  to  be  a  literal  fact  in  temporal  matters,  it  is 
violating  the  analogy  of  the  Constitution,  and  dealing 
with  the  most  important  subjects  in  a  mere  spirit  of 
narrow  perverseness,  to  insist  that  it  can  have  none 
but  a  literal  meaning  in  ecclesiastical  matters ;  and 
that  the  Church  did  mean,  though  the  State  did  not,  to 
accept  a  despotic  prerogative,  unbounded  by  custom, 
convention,  or  law,  and  unchecked  by  acknowledged 
and  active  powers  in  herself  Yet  such  is  the  assump- 
tion, made  in  bitterness  and  vexation  of  spirit  by  some 
of  those  who    have   lately   so  hastily  given  up  her 

'  Allen  on  the  Royal  Prerogative,  pp.  1-3. 


I  MR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY  15 

cause ;  made  with  singular  assurance  by  others,  who, 
Liberals  in  all  their  political  doctrines,  have,  for  want 
of  better  arguments,  invoked  prerogative  against  the 
Church. 

What  the  securities  and  checks  were  that  the 
Church,  not  less  than  the  nation,  contemplated  and 
possessed,  are  not  expressed  in  the  theory  itself  of  the 
royal  prerogative ;  and,  as  in  the  case  of  the  nation, 
we  might  presume  beforehand,  that  they  would  be 
found  in  practice  rather  than  on  paper.  They  were, 
however,  real  ones.  "  With  the  same  theoretical 
laxity  and  practical  security,"  as  in  the  case  of  Par- 
liaments and  temporal  judges,  "was  provision  made 
for  the  conduct  of  Church  affairs."  Making  allow- 
ance for  the  never  absent  disturbances  arising  out 
of  political  trouble  and  of  personal  character,  the 
Church  had  very  important  means  of  making  her  own 
power  felt  in  the  administration  of  her  laws,  as  well 
as  in  the  making  of  them. 

The  real  question,  I  apprehend,  is  this  : — When  the 
Church  assented  to  those  great  concessions  which  were 
embodied  in  our  permanent  law  at  the  Reformation,  had 
she  adequate  securities  that  the  powers  so  conveyed 
would  be  exercised,  upon  the  whole,  with  a  due  regard 
to  the  integrity  of  her  faith,  and  of  her  office,  which  was 
and  has  ever  been  a  part  of  that  faith  ?  I  do  not  ask 
whether  these  securities  were  all  on  parchment  or  not 
— whether  they  were  written  or  unwritten — whether  they 
were  in  statute,  or  in  common  law,  or  in  fixed  usage,  or 
in  the  spirit  of  the  Constitution  and  in  the  habits  of  the 


16   MR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY    i 

people — I  ask  the  one  vital  question,  whether,  whatever 
they  were  in  form,  they  were  in  substance  sufficient  ? 

The  securities  which  the  Church  had  were  these : 
First,  that  the  assembling  of  the  Convocation  was  ob- 
viously necessary  for  the  purposes  of  taxation  ;  secondly 
and  mainly,  that  the  very  solemn  and  fundamental  laws 
by  which  the  jurisdiction  of  the  See  of  Rome  was  cut 
off,  assigned  to  the  spiritualty  of  the  realm  the  care  of 
matters  spiritual,  as  distinctly  and  formally  as  to  the 
temporalty  the  care  of  matters  temporal ;  and  that  it 
was  an  understood  principle,  and  (as  long  as  it  con- 
tinued) a  regular  usage  of  the  Constitution,  that  ecclesi- 
astical laws  should  be  administered  by  ecclesiastical 
judges.  These  were  the  securities  on  which  the  Church 
relied  ;  on  which  she  had  a  right  to  rely ;  and  on  which, 
for  a  long  series  of  years,  her  alliance  was  justified  by 
the  results. 

And  further : — 

The  Church  had  this  great  and  special  security  on 
which  to  rely,  that  the  Sovereigns  of  this  country  were, 
for  a  century  after  the  Reformation,  amongst  her  best 
instructed,  and  even  in  some  instances  her  most  devoted 
children  :  that  all  who  made  up  the  governing  body 
(with  an  insignificant  exception)  owned  personal  allegi- 
ance to  her,  and  that  she  might  well  rest  on  that  per- 
sonal allegiance  as  warranting  beforehand  the  expecta- 
tion, which  after  experience  made  good,  that  the  office 
of  the  State  towards  her  would  be  discharged  in  a 
friendly  and  kindly  spirit,  and  that  the  principles  of 
constitutional  law  and  civil  order  would  not  be  strained 
against  her,  but  fairly  and  fully  applied  in  her  behalf. 


I  MR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY  17 

These  securities  she  now  finds  herself  deprived  of. 
This  is  the  great  change  made  in  her  position — made 
insensibly,  and  in  a  great  measure,  undesignedly — 
which  has  altered  altogether  the  understanding  on 
which  she  stood  towards  the  Crown  at  the  Reforma- 
tion. It  now  turns  out  that  that  understanding, 
though  it  might  have  been  deemed  sufficient  for  the 
time,  was  not  precise  enough ;  and  further,  was  not . 
sufficiently  looked  after  in  the  times  which  followed. 
And  on  us  comes  the  duty  of  taking  care  that  it  be 
not  finally  extinguished ;  thrown  off  by  the  despair  of 
one  side,  and  assumed  by  the  other  as  at  length 
abandoned  to  their  aggression. 

Mr.  Gladstone  comes  to  the  question  with  the 
feelings  of  a  statesman,  conscious  of  the  greatness  and 
excellence  of  the  State,  and  anxious  that  the  Church 
should  not  provoke  its  jealousy,  and  in  urging  her 
claims  should  "take  her  stand,  as  to  all  matters  of 
substance  and  principle,  on  the  firm  ground  of  history 
and  law."  It  makes  his  judgment  on  the  present 
state  of  things  more  solemn,  and  his  conviction  of  the 
necessity  of  amending  it  more  striking,  when  they  are 
those  of  one  so  earnest  for  conciliation  and  peace. 
But  on  constitutional  not  less  than  on  other  grounds, 
he  pronounces  the  strongest  condemnation  on  the 
present  formation  of  the  Court  of  Appeal,  which, 
working  in  a  way  which  even  its  framers  did  not  con- 
template, has  brought  so  much  distress  into  the 
Church,  and  which  yet,  in  defiance  of  principle,  of 
consistency,  and  of  the  admission  of  its  faultiness,  is 

VOL.   II  c 


18  MR.  GLADSTONE  OX  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY    i 

so  recklessly  maintained.  Feeling  and  stating  very 
strongly  the  evil  sustained  by  the  Church,  from  the 
suspension  of  her  legislative  powers, — "that  loss  of 
command  over  her  work,  and  over  the  heart  of  the 
nation,  which  it  has  brought  upon  her," — so  strongly 
indeed  that  his  words,  coming  from  one  familiar  with 
the  chances  and  hazards  of  a  deliberative  assembly,  give 
new  weight  to  the  argument  for  the  resumption  of 
those  powers, — feeling  all  this,  he  is  ready  to  acquiesce 
in  the  measure  beyond  which  the  Bishops  did  not  feel 
authorised  to  go,  and  which  Mr.  Gladstone  regards 
as  "  representing  the  extremest  point  up  to  which  the 
love  of  peace  might  properly  carry  the  concessions  of 
the  Church  "  :— 

That  which  she  is  entitled  in  the  spirit  of  the  Con- 
stitution to  demand  would  be  that  the  Queen's  ecclesias- 
tical laws  shall  be  administered  by  the  Queen's  ecclesias- 
tical judges,  of  whom  the  Bishops  are  the  chief;  and 
this,  too,  under  the  checks  which  the  sitting  of  a  body 
appointed  for  ecclesiastical  legislation  would  impose. 

But  if  it  is  not  of  vital  necessity  that  a  Church 
Legislature  should  sit  at  the  present  time — if  it  is  not  of 
vital  necessity  that  all  causes  termed  ecclesiastical  should 
be  treated  under  special  safeguards — if  it  is  not  of  vital 
necessity  that  the  function  of  judgment  should  be  taken 
out  of  the  hands  of  the  existing  court — let  the  Church 
frankly  and  at  once  subscribe  to  every  one  of  these  great 
concessions,  and  reduce  her  demands  to  a  mitiiuium  at 
the  outset. 

Laws  ecclesiastical  by  ecclesiastical  judges,  let  this 
be  her  principle  ;  it  plants  her  on  the  ground  of  ancient 


I  MR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY  19 

times,  of  the  Reformation,  of  our  continuous  history,  of 
reason  and  of  right.  The  utmost  moderation,  in  the 
appHcation  of  the  principle,  let  this  be  her  temper,  and 
then  her  case  will  be  strong  in  the  face  of  God  and  man, 
and,  come  what  may,  she  will  conquer.  ...  If,  my 
Lord,  it  be  felt  by  the  rulers  of  the  Church,  that  a 
scheme  like  this  will  meet  sufficiently  the  necessities  of 
her  case,  it  must  be  no  small  additional  comfort  to  them 
to  feel  that  their  demand  is  every  way  within  the  spirit 
of  the  Constitution,  and  short  of  the  terms  which  the 
great  compact  of  the  Reformation  would  authorise  you 
to  seek.  You,  and  not  those  who  are  against  you,  will 
take  your  stand  with  Coke  and  Blackstone ;  you,  and 
not  they,  will  wield  the  weapons  of  constitutional  prin- 
ciple and  law  ;  you,  and  not  they,  will  be  entitled  to 
claim  the  honour  of  securing  the  peace  of  the  State  no 
less  than  the  faith  of  the  Church  ;  you,  and  not  they, 
will  justly  point  the  admonitory  finger  to  those  remark- 
able words  of  the  Institutes  : — 

"And  certain  it  is,  that  this  Kingdom  hath  been  best 
governed,  and  peace  and  quiet  preserved,  when  both 
parties,  that  is,  when  the  justices  of  the  temporal  courts 
and  the  ecclesiastical  judges  have  kept  themselves 
within  their  proper  jurisdiction,  without  encroaching  or 
usurping  one  upon  another  ;  and  where  such  encroach- 
ments or  usurpations  have  been  made,  they  have  been 
the  seeds  of  great  trouble  and  inconvenience." 

Because  none  can  resist  the  principle  of  your  pro- 
posal, who  admit  that  the  Church  has  a  sphere  of  proper 
jurisdiction  at  all,  or  any  duty  beyond  that  of  taking  the 
rule  of  her  doctrine  and  her  practice  from  the  lips  of 
ministers    or    parliaments.      If   it   shall    be  deliberately 


20  ]\IR.  GLADSTONE  ON  THE  ROYAL  SUPREMACY    i 

refused  to  adopt  a  proposition  so  moderate,  so  guarded 
and  restrained  in  the  particular  instance,  and  so  sus- 
tained by  history,  by  analogy,  and  by  common  reason, 
in  the  case  of  the  faith  of  the  Church,  and  if  no  prefer- 
able measure  be  substituted,  it  can  only  be  in  conse- 
quence of  a  latent  intention  that  the  voice  of  the  Civil 
Power  should  be  henceforward  supreme  in  the  deter- 
mination of  Christian  doctrine. 

We  trust  that  such  an  assurance,  backed  as  it  is  by 
the  solemn  and  earnest  warnings  of  one  who  is  not  an 
enthusiast  or  an  agitator,  but  one  of  the  leading  men 
in  the  Parliament  of  England,  will  not  be  without  its 
full  weight  with  those  on  whom  devolves  the  duty  of 
guiding  and  leading  us  in  this  crisis.  The  Bishops  of 
England  have  a  great  responsibility  on  them.  Reason, 
not  less  than  Christian  loyalty  and  Christian  charity, 
requires  the  fairest  interpretation  of  their  acts,  and  it 
may  be  of  their  hesitation, — the  utmost  consideration 
of  their  difficulties.  But  reason,  not  less  than  Chris- 
tian loyalty  and  charity,  expects  that,  having  accepted 
the  responsibilities  of  the  Episcopate,  they  should  not 
withdraw  from  them  when  they  arrive  ;  and  that  there 
should  be  neither  shrinking  nor  rest  nor  compromise 
till  the  creed  and  the  rights  of  the  Church  entrusted 
to  their  fidelity  be  placed,  as  far  as  depends  on  them, 
beyond  danger. 


II 


JOYCE  ON  COURTS  OF  SPIRITUAL 
APPEAL 1 

Nothing  can  be  more  natural  than  the  extreme  dis- 
satisfaction felt  by  a  large  body  of  persons  in  the 
Church  of  England  at  the  present  Court  of  Final 
"Appeal  in  matters  of  doctrine.  The  grievance,  and 
its  effect,  may  have  been  exaggerated;  and  the  ex- 
pressions of  feeling  about  it  certainly  have  not  always 
been  the  wisest  and  most  becoming.  But  as  the 
Church  of  England  is  acknowledged  to  hold  certain 
doctrines  on  matters  of  the  highest  importance,  and, 
in  common  with  all  other  religious  bodies,  claims  the 
right  of  saying  what  are  her  own  doctrines,  it  is  not 
surprising  that  an  arrangement  which  seems  likely  to 
end  in  handing  over  to  indifferent  or  unfriendly  judges 
the  power  of  saying  what  those  doctrines  are,  or  even 
whether  she  has  any  doctrines  at  all,  should  create 
irritation  and  impatience.  There  is  nothing  peculiar 
to  the  English  Church  in  the  assumption,  either  that 

1  Ecclesia  Vindicata ;  a  Treatise  on  Appeals  in  Matters 
Spiritual.  By  James  Wayland  Joyce.  Saturday  Review,  22nd 
October  1864. 


22     JOYCE  ON  COURTS  OF  SPIRITUAL  APPEAL       ii 

outsiders  should  not  meddle  with  and  govern  what 
she  professes  to  believe  and  teach,  or  that  the  proper 
and  natural  persons  to  deal  with  theological  ques- 
tions are  the  class  set  apart  to  teach  and  maintain 
her  characteristic  belief.  Whatever  may  ultimately 
become  of  these  assumptions,  they  unquestionably 
represent  the  ideas  which  have  been  derived  from 
the  earliest  and  the  uniform  practice  of  the  Chris- 
tian Church,  and  are  held  by  most  even  of  the 
sects  which  have  separated  from  it.  To  any  one 
who  does  not  look  upon  the  English  Church  as 
simply  a  legally  constituted  department  of  the 
State,  Hke  the  army  or  navy  or  the  department  of 
revenue,  and  believes  it  to  have  a  basis  and  authority 
of  its  own,  antecedent  to  its  rights  by  statute,  there 
cannot  but  be  a  great  anomaly  in  an  arrangement 
which,  when  doctrinal  questions  are  pushed  to  their 
final  issues,  seems  to  deprive  her  of  any  voice  or 
control  in  the  matters  in  which  she  is  most  interested, 
and  commits  them  to  the  decision,  not  merely  of  a 
lay,  but  of  a  secular  and  not  necessarily  even  Christian 
court,  where  the  feeling  about  them  is  not  unlikely  to 
be  that  represented  by  the  story,  told  by  Mr.  Joyce, 
of  the  eminent  lawyer  who  said  of  some  theological 
debate  that  he  could  only  decide  it  "  by  tossing  up  a 
coin  of  the  realm."  The  anomaly  of  such  a  court 
can  hardly  be  denied,  both  as  a  matter  of  theory  and 
— supposing  it  to  matter  at  all  what  Church  doctrine 
really  is — as  illustrated  in  some  late  results  of  its 
action.     It  is  still  more  provoking  to  observe,  as  Mr. 


II        JOYCE  ON  COURTS  OF  SPIRITUAL  APPEAL     23 

Joyce  brings  out  in  his  historical  sketch,  that  simple 
carelessness  and  blundering  have  conspired  with  the 
evident  tendency  of  things  to  cripple  and  narrow  the 
jurisdiction  of  the  Church  in  what  seems  to  be  her 
proper  sphere.  The  ecclesiastical  appeals,  before  the 
Reformation,  were  to  the  ecclesiastical  jurisdiction 
alone.  They  were  given  to  the  civil  power  by  the 
Tudor  legislation,  but  to  the  civil  power  acting,  if  not 
by  the  obligation  of  law,  yet  by  usage  and  in  fact, 
through  ecclesiastical  organs  and  judges.  Lastly,  by 
a  recent  change,  of  which  its  authors  have  admitted 
that  they  did  not  contemplate  the  effect,  these  appeals 
are  now  to  the  civil  jurisdiction  acting  through  purely 
civil  courts.  It  is  an  aggravation  of  this,  when  the 
change  which  seems  so  formidable  has  become  firmly 
established,  to  be  told  that  it  was,  after  all,  the  result 
of  accident  and  inadvertence,  and  a  "  careless  use  of 
terms  in  drafting  an  Act  of  Parliament " ;  and  that 
difficult  and  perilous  theological  questions  have  come, 
by  "  a  haphazard  chance,"  before  a  court  which  was 
never  meant  to  decide  them.  It  cannot  be  doubted 
that  those  who  are  most  interested  in  the  Church  of 
England  feel  deeply  and  strongly  about  keeping  up 
what  they  believe  to  be  the  soundness  and  purity  of 
her  professed  doctrine;  and  they  think  that,  under 
fair  conditions,  they  have  clear  and  firm  ground  for 
making  good  their  position.  But  it  seems  by  no 
means  unlikely  that  in  the  working  of  the  Court  of 
Final  Appeal  there  will  be  found  a  means  of  evading 
the  substance  of  questions,  and  of  disposing  of  very 


24     JOYCE  ON  COURTS  OF  SPIRITUAL  APPEAL       ii 

important  issues  by  a  side  wind,  to  the  prejudice  of 
what  have  hitherto  been  recognised  as  rightful  claims. 
An  arrangement  which  bears  hard  upon  the  Church 
theoretically,  as  a  controversial  argument  in  the  hands 
of  Dr.  Manning  or  Mr.  Binney,  and  as  an  additional 
proof  of  its  Erastian  subjection  to  the  State,  and 
which  also  works  ill  and  threatens  serious  mischief, 
may  fairly  be  regarded  by  Churchmen  with  jealousy 
and  dislike,  and  be  denounced  as  injurious  to  interests 
for  which  they  have  a  right  to  claim  respect.  The 
complaint  that  the  State  is  going  to  force  new  senses 
on  theological  terms,  or  to  change  by  an  unavowed 
process  the  meaning  of  acknowledged  formularies  in 
such  a  body  as  the  English  Church,  is  at  least  as 
deserving  of  attention  as  the  reluctance  of  conscien- 
tious Dissenters  to  pay  Church-rates. 

Mr.  Joyce's  book  shows  comprehensively  and 
succinctly  the  history  of  the  changes  which  have 
brought  matters  to  their  present  point,  and  the  look 
which  they  wear  in  the  eyes  of  a  zealous  Churchman, 
disturbed  both  by  the  shock  given  to  his  ideas  of 
fitness  and  consistency,  and  by  the  prospect  of 
practical  evils.  It  is  a  clergyman's  view  of  the  subject, 
but  it  is  not  disposed  of  by  saying  that  it  is  a 
clergyman's  view.  It  is  incomplete  and  one-sided, 
and  leaves  out  considerations  of  great  importance 
which  ought  to  be  attended  to  in  forming  a  judgment 
on  the  whole  question  ;  but  it  is  difificult  to  say  that, 
regarded  simply  in  itself,  the  claim  that  the  Church 
should  settle  her  own  controversies,  and  that  Church 


IT        JOYCE  ON  COURTS  OF  SPIRITUAL  APPEAL     25 

doctrine  should  be  judged  of  in  Church  courts,  is  not 
a  reasonable  one.  The  truth  is  that  the  present 
arrangement,  if  we  think  only  of  its  abstract  suitableness 
and  its  direct  and  ostensible  claims  to  our  respect, 
would  need  Swift  himself  to  do  justice  to  its  exquisite 
unreasonableness.  It  is  absurd  to  assume,  as  it  is 
assumed  in  the  whole  of  our  ecclesiastical  lesrislation, 
that  the  Church  is  bound  to  watch  most  jealously  over 
doctrine,  and  then  at  the  last  moment  to  refuse  her 
the  natural  means  of  guarding  it.  It  is  absurd  to 
assume  that  the  "  spiritualty "  are  the  only  proper 
persons  to  teach  doctrine,  and  then  to  act  as  if  they 
were  unfit  to  judge  of  doctrine.  It  is  not  easy,  in  the 
abstract,  to  see  why  articles  which  were  trusted  to 
clergymen  to  draw  up  may  not  be  trusted  to 
clergymen  to  explain,  and  why  what  there  was  learning 
and  wisdom  enough  to  do  in  the  violent  party  times 
and  comparative  inexperience  of  the  Reformation, 
cannot  be  safely  left  to  the  learning  and  wisdom  of  our 
day  for  correction  or  completion.  If  Churchmen  and 
ecclesiastics  may  care  too  much  for  the  things  about 
which  they  dispute,  it  seems  undeniable  that  lawyers, 
who  need  not  even  be  Christians,  may  care  for  them 
too  little  ;  and  if  the  Churchmen  make  a  mistake  in 
the  matter,  at  least  it  is  their  own  affair,  and  they  may  be 
more  fairly  made  to  take  the  consequences  of  their  own 
acts  than  of  other  people's.  A  strong  case,  if  a  strong 
case  were  all  that  was  wanted,  might  be  made  out  for  a 
change  in  the  authority  which  at  present  pronounces 
in  the  last  resort  on  Church  of  England  doctrine, 


26     JOYCE  ON  COURTS  OF  SPIRITUAL  APPEAL       ii 

But  the  difficulty  is,  not  to  see  that  the  present 
state  of  things,  which  has  come  about  almost  by 
accident,  is  irregular  and  unsatisfactory,  and  that  in  it 
the  civil  power  has  stolen  a  march  on  the  privileges 
which  even  Tudors  and  Hanoverians  left  to  the 
Church,  but  to  suggest  what  would  be  more  just  and 
more  promising.  A  mixed  tribunal,  composed  of 
laymen  and  ecclesiastics,  would  be  in  effect,  as  Mr 
Joyce  perceives,  simply  the  present  court  with  a  sham 
colour  of  Church  authority  added  to  it ;  and  he 
describes  with  candid  force  the  confusion  which  might 
arise  if  the  lawyers  and  divines  took  different  sides, 
and  how,  in  the  unequal  struggle,  the  latter  might 
"  find  themselves  hopelessly  prostrate  in  the  stronger 
grasp  of  their  more  powerful  associates."  His  own 
scheme  of  a  theological  and  ecclesiastical  committee 
of  reference,  to  which  a  purely  legal  tribunal  might 
send  down  questions  of  doctrine  to  be  answered,  as 
"  experts  "  or  juries  give  answers  about  matters  of 
science  or  matters  of  fact,  is  hardly  more  hopeful ;  for 
even  he  would  not  bind  the  legal  court,  as  of  course 
it  could  not  be  bound,  to  accept  the  doctrine  of  the 
ecclesiastical  committee.  He  promises,  indeed,  on 
the  authority  of  Lord  Derby,  that  in  ninety-nine  cases 
out  of  a  hundred  the  lawyers  would  accept  the  answer 
of  the  divines ;  but  whatever  the  scandal  is  now,  it 
would  be  far  greater  if  an  unorthodox  judgment  were 
given  in  flat  contradiction  to  the  report  of  the  com- 
mittee of  reference. 

As  to   a   purely  ecclesiastical    Court    of   Appeal, 


II        JOYCE  ON  COURTS  OF  SPIRITUAL  APPEAL     27 

in  the  present  state  of  the  Church  both  in  England 
and  all  over  the  world,  it  ought  to  console  those 
who  must  be  well  aware  that  here  at  least  it  is 
hardly  to  be  looked  for,  to  reflect  how  such  courts 
act,  after  all,  where  they  have  the  power  to  act, 
and  how  far  things  would  have  gone  in  a  better  or 
happier  fashion  among  us  if,  instead  of  the  Privy 
Council,  there  had  been  a  tribunal  of  divines  to  give 
final  judgment.  The  history  of  appeals  to  Rome, 
from  the  days  of  the  Jansenists  and  Fenelon  to  those 
of  Lamennais,  may  be  no  doubt  satisfactory  to  those 
who  believe  it  necessary  to  ascribe  to  the  Pope  the 
highest  wisdom  and  the  most  consummate  justice ; 
but  to  those  who  venture  to  notice  the  real  steps  of 
the  process,  and  the  collateral  considerations,  political 
and  local,  which  influenced  the  decision,  the  review 
is  hardly  calculated  to  make  those  who  are  debarred 
from  it  regret  the  loss  of  this  unalloyed  purity  of 
ecclesiastical  jurisdiction.  And,  as  regards  ourselves, 
it  is  true  that  an  ecclesiastical  tribunal  would  hardly 
have  been  ingenious  enough  to  find  the  means  of 
saying  that  Messrs.  Wilson  and  Williams  had  not 
taught  in  contradiction  to  the  doctrines  of  the  English 
Church,  and  that  they  actually,  under  its  present 
constitution,  possessed  the  liberty  which,  under  a 
different — and,  as  some  people  think,  a  better — 
constitution,  they  might  possess.  But  it  ought  also  to 
be  borne  in  mind  what  other  judgments  ecclesiastical 
tribunals  might  have  given.  An  ecclesiastical  tribunal, 
unless  it  had  been  packed  or  accidentally  one-sided. 


28     JOYCE  ON  COURTS  OF  SPIRITUAL  APPEAL        ii 

would  probably  have  condemned  Mr.  Gorham.  An 
ecclesiastical  tribunal  would  almost  certainly  have 
expelled  Archdeacon  Denison  from  his  preferments. 
Indeed,  the  judgment  of  the  Six  Doctors  on  Dr. 
Pusey,  arbitrary  and  unconstitutional  as  it  may  be 
considered,  was  by  no  means  a  doubtful  foreshadowing 
of  what  a  verdict  upon  him  would  have  been  from 
any  court  that  w^e  can  imagine  formed  of  the  high 
ecclesiastical  authorities  of  the  time.  It  undoubtedly 
seems  the  most  natural  thing  in  the  world  that  a  great 
religious  body  should  settle,  without  hindrance,  its 
own  doctrines  and  control  its  own  ministers ;  but  it 
is  also  some  compensation  for  the  perversity  wuth 
which  the  course  of  things  has  interfered  with  ideal 
completeness,  that  our  condition,  if  it  had  been  theo- 
retically perfect,  would  have  been  perfectly  intolerable. 
It  would  be  highly  unwise  in  those  who  direct  the 
counsels  of  the  Church  of  England  to  accept  a  practical 
disadvantage  for  the  gain  of  a  greater  simplicity  and 
consistency  of  system.  The  true  moral  to  be  deduced 
from  the  anomalies  of  ecclesiastical  appeals  seems  to 
be,  to  have  as  little  to  do  with  them  as  possible.  The 
idea  of  seeking  a  remedy  for  the  perplexities  of 
theology  in  judicial  rulings,  and  the  rage  for  having 
recourse  to  law  courts,  are  of  recent  date  in  our  con- 
troversies. They  were  revived  among  us  as  one  of 
the  results  of  the  violent  panic  caused  by  the  Oxford 
movement,  and  of  the  inconsiderate  impatience 
of  surprised  ignorance  which  dictated  extreme  and 
forcible  measures ;  and  as  this  is  a  kind  of  game  at 


n        JOYCE  ON  COURTS  OF  SPIRITUAL  APPEAL     29 

which,  when  once  started,  both  parties  can  play,  the 
poHcy  of  setting  the  law  in  motion  to  silence  theo- 
logical opponents  has  become  a  natural  and  favourite 
one.  But  it  may  be  some  excuse  for  the  legislators 
who,  in  1833,  in  constructing  a  new  Court  of  Appeal, 
so  completely  forgot  or  underrated  the  functions  which 
it  would  be  called  to  discharge  in  the  decision  of 
momentous  doctrinal  questions,  that  at  the  time  no 
one  thought  much  of  carrying  theological  controversies 
to  legal  arbitrament.  The  experiment  is  a  natural  one 
to  have  been  made  in  times  of  strong  and  earnest 
religious  contention  ;  but,  now  that  it  has  had  its 
course,  it  is  not  difficult  to  see  that  it  was  a  mistaken 
one.  There  seems  something  almost  ludicrously  in- 
congruous in  bringing  a  theological  question  into  the 
atmosphere  and  within  the  technical  handling  of  a  law 
court,  and  in  submitting  delicate  and  subtle  attempts 
to  grasp  the  mysteries  of  the  unseen  and  the  infinite, 
of  God  and  the  soul,  of  grace  and  redemption,  to  the 
hard  logic  and  intentionally  confined  and  limited  view 
of  forensic  debate.  Theological  truth,  in  the  view  of 
all  who  believe  in  it,  must  always  remain  independent 
of  a  legal  decision  ;  and,  therefore,  as  regards  any 
real  settlement,  a  theological  question  must  come  out 
of  a  legal  sentence  in  a  totally  different  condition  from 
any  others  where  the  true  and  indisputable  law  of  the 
case  is,  for  the  time  at  least,  what  the  supreme  tribunal 
has  pronounced  it  to  be.  People  chafed  at  not  getting 
what  they  thought  the  plain  broad  conclusions  from 
facts  and  documents  accepted  :  they  appealed  to  law 


30      JOYCE  ON  COURTS  OF  SPIRITUAL  APPEAL        ii 

from  the  uncertainty  of  controversy,  and  found  law 
still  more  uncertain,  and  a  good  deal  more  dangerous. 
They  thought  that  they  were  going  to  condemn  crimes 
and  expel  wrongdoers  ;  they  found  that  these  pro- 
secutions inevitably  assumed  the  character  of  the  old 
political  trials,  which  were  but  an  indirect  and  very 
mischievous  form  of  the  struggle  between  two  avowed 
parties,  and  in  which,  though  the  technical  question 
was  whether  the  accused  had  committed  the  crime, 
the  real  one  was  whether  the  alleged  crime  were  a 
crime  at  all.  Accordingly,  wider  considerations  than 
those  arising  out  of  the  strict  merits  of  the  case  told 
upon  the  decision  ;  and  the  negative  judgment,  and 
resolute  evasion  of  a  condemnation,  in  each  of  the 
cases  which  were  of  wide  and  serious  importance, 
were  proofs  of  the  same  tendency  in  English  opinion 
which  has  made  political  trials,  except  in  the  most 
extreme  cases,  almost  inconceivable.  They  mean  that 
the  questions  raised  must  be  fought  out  and  settled 
in  a  different  and  more  genuine  way,  and  that  law 
feels  itself  out  of  place  when  called  to  interfere  in 
them.  As  all  parties  have  failed  in  turning  the  law 
into  a  weapon,  and  yet  as  all  parties  have  really  gained 
much  more  than  they  have  lost  by  the  odd  anomalies 
of  our  ecclesiastical  jurisprudence,  the  wisest  course 
would  seem  to  be  for  those  who  feel  the  deep  im- 
portance of  doctrinal  questions  to  leave  the  law  alone, 
either  as  to  employing  it  or  attempting  to  change  it. 
Controversy,  argument,  the  display  of  the  intrinsic 
and  inherent  strength  of  a  great  and  varied  system, 


II        JOYCE  ON  COURTS  OF  SPIRITUAL  APPEAL     31 

are  what  all  causes  must  in  the  last  resort  trust  to. 
Lord  Westbury  will  have  done  the  Church  of  England 
more  good  than  perhaps  he  thought  of  doing,  if  his 
dicta  make  theologians  see  that  they  can  be  much 
better  and  more  hopefully  employed  than  in  trying 
legal  conclusions  with  unorthodox  theorisers,  or  in 
busying  themselves  with  inventing  imaginary  improve- 
ments for  a  Final  Court  of  Appeal. 


Ill 

PRIVY   COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS^ 

The  Bishop  of  London  has  done  a  useful  service  in 
causing  the  various  decisions  of  the  present  Court  of 
Appeal  to  be  collected  into  a  volume.  There  is  such 
an  obvious  convenience  about  the  plan  that  it  hardly 
needed  the  conventional  reason  given  for  it,  that  "  the 
knowledge  generally  possessed  on  the  subject  of  the 
Court  is  vague,  and  the  sources  from  which  accurate 
information  can  be  obtained  are  little  understood;  and 
that  people  who  discuss  it  ought  in  the  first  place  to 
know  what  the  Court  is,  and  what  it  does."  This  is 
the  mere  customary  formula  of  a  preface  turned  into 
a  rhetorical  insinuation  which  would  have  been  better 
away ;  most  of  those  who  care  about  the  subject,  and 
have  expressed  opinions  about  it,  know  pretty  well  the 

^  A  Collection  of  the  Judgments  of  the  Judicial  Cofn?nittee  of  the 
Privy  Council  in  Ecclesiastical  Cases  relating  to  Doctrine  and 
Discipline ;  with  a  Preface  by  the  Lord  Bishop  of  London,  a?id  an 
Historical  Introduction.  Edited  by  the  Hon.  G.  Brodrick,  Bar- 
rister-at-La\v,  and  Rev.  the  Hon.  W.  H.  Fremantle,  Chaplain  to  the 
Bishop  of  London.      Guardian,  15th  February  1865. 


Ill  PRIVY  COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS  33 

nature  of  the  Court  and  the  result  of  its  working,  and 
whatever  variations  there  may  be  in  the  judgment 
passed  upon  it  arise  not  from  any  serious  imperfection 
of  knowledge  but  from  differences  of  principle.  It 
was  hardly  suitable  in  a  work  like  this  to  assume  a 
mystery  and  obscurity  about  the  subject  where  there 
is  really  none,  and  to  claim  superior  exactness  and 
authenticity  of  information  about  a  matter  which  in 
all  its  substantial  points  is  open  to  all  the  world. 
And  we  could  conceive  the  design,  well-intentioned 
as  it  is,  carried  out  in  a  way  more  fitting  to  the  gravity 
of  the  occasion  which  has  suggested  it.  The  Bishop 
says  truly  enough  that  the  questions  involved  in  the 
constitution  of  such  a  court  are  some  of  the  most 
difficult  with  which  statesmen  have  to  deal.  There- 
fore it  seems  to  us  that  a  collection  of  the  decisions 
of  such  a  court,  put  forth  for  the  use  of  the  Church 
and  nation  under  the  authority  of  the  Bishop  of 
London,  ought  to  have  had  the  dignity  and  the  reserve 
of  a  work  meant  for  permanence  and  for  the  use  of  men 
of  various  opinions,  and  ought  not  to  have  had  even  the 
semblance,  as  this  book  has,  of  an  ex  parte  pamphlet. 
The  Bishop  of  London  is,  of  course,  quite  right  to 
let  the  Church  know  what  he  thinks  about  the  Court 
of  Final  Appeal ;  and  he  is  perfectly  justified  in  re- 
commending us,  in  forming  our  opinion,  to  study 
carefully  the  facts  of  the  existing  state  of  things ;  but 
it  seems  hardly  becoming  to  make  the  facts  a  vehicle 
for  indirectly  forcing  on  us,  in  the  shape  of  comments, 
a  very  definite  and  one-sided  view  of  them,  which  is 

VOL.  H  O 


34  PRIVY  COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS  iii 

the  very  subject  of  vehement  contradiction  and  dis- 
pute. It  would  have  been  better  to  have  committed 
what  was  necessary  in  the  way  of  explanation  and 
illustration  to  some  one  of  greater  weight  and  experi- 
ence than  two  clever  young  men  of  strong  bias  and 
manifest  indisposition  to  respect  or  attend  to,  or  even 
to  be  patient  with,  any  aspect  of  the  subject  but  their 
own  in  this  complicated  and  eventful  question,  and 
who,  partly  from  overlooking  great  and  material 
elements  in  it,  and  partly  from  an  imperfect  appre- 
hension of  what  they  had  to  do,  have  failed  to  present 
even  the  matters  of  fact  wath  which  they  deal  with 
the  necessary  exactness  and  even  -  handedness.  It 
seems  to  us  that  in  a  work  intended  for  the  general 
use  of  the  Church  and  addressed  to  men  of  all 
opinions,  they  only  remember  to  be  thoroughgoing 
advocates  and  justifiers  of  the  Court  w^hich  happens 
to  have  grown  into  such  important  consequence  to 
the  English  Church.  The  position  is  a  perfectly 
legitimate  one ;  but  we  think  it  had  better  not  have 
been  connected  wath  a  documentary  work  like  the 
present,  set  forth  by  the  direction  and  under  the 
sanction  of  a  Bishop  of  London. 

In  looking  over  the  cases  which  have  been  brought 
together  into  a  connected  series,  the  first  point  which 
is  suggested  by  the  review  is  the  great  and  important 
change  in  the  aspect  and  bearing  of  doctrinal  con- 
troversies, and  in  the  situation  of  the  Church,  as 
affected  by  them,  which  the  creation  and  action  of 
this  Court  have  made.     From   making   it   almost  a 


Ill  PRIVY  COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS  35 

matter  of  principle  and  boast  to  dispense  with  any 
living  judge  of  controversies,  the  Church  has  passed 
to  having  a  very  energetic  one.  Up  to  the  Gorham 
judgment,  it  can  hardly  be  said  that  the  ruling  of 
courts  of  law  had  had  the  slightest  influence  on  the 
doctrinal  position  and  character  of  the  Church.  Keen 
and  fierce  as  had  been  the  controversies  in  the  Church 
up  to  that  judgment,  how  often  had  a  legal  testing  of 
her  standards  been  seriously  sought  for  or  seriously 
appealed  to  ?  There  had  been  accusations  of  heresy, 
trials,  condemnations,  especially  in  the  times  follow- 
ing the  Reformation  and  preceding  the  Civil  War; 
there  had  been  appeals  and  final  judgments  given  in 
such  final  courts  as  existed ;  but  all  without  making 
any  mark  on  the  public  mind  or  the  received  meaning 
of  doctrines  and  formularies,  and  without  leaving  a 
trace  except  in  law  reports.  They  seem  to  have  been 
forgotten  as  soon  as  the  particular  case  was  disposed 
of.  The  limits  of  supposed  orthodox  belief  revived  ; 
but  it  w^as  not  the  action  of  judicial  decisions  which 
either  narrowed  or  enlarged  them.  Bishop  Marsh's 
Calvinists  never  thought  of  having  recourse  to  law. 
If  the  Church  did  not  do  entirely  without  a  Court  of 
Final  Appeal,  it  is  simply  a  matter  of  fact  that  the 
same  weight  and  authority  w^ere  not  attached  to  the 
proceedings  of  such  a  court  which  are  attached  to 
them  now.  But  since  the  Gorham  case,  the  work  of 
settling  authoritatively,  if  not  the  meaning  of  doctrines 
and  of  formularies,  at  any  rate  the  methods  of  inter- 
preting and  applying  them,  has  been  briskly  going  on 


36  PRIVY  COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS  iii 

in  the  courts,  and  a  law  laid  down  by  judges  without 
appeal  has  been  insensibly  fastening  its  hold  upon  us. 
The  action  of  the  courts  is  extolled  as  being  all  in  the 
direction  of  liberty.  Whatever  this  praise  may  be 
worth,  it  is  to  be  observed  that  it  is,  after  all,  a  wooden 
sort  of  liberty,  and  shuts  up  quite  as  much  as  it  opens. 
It  may  save,  in  this  case  or  that,  individual  liberty ; 
but  it  does  so  by  narrowing  artificially  the  natural 
and  common-sense  grounds  of  argument  in  religious 
controversy,  and  abridging  as  much  as  possible  the 
province  of  theology.  Before  the  Gorham  case,  the 
Formularies  in  general  were  the  standard  and  test,  free 
to  both  sides,  about  baptismal  regeneration.  Both 
parties  had  the  ground  open  to  them,  to  make 
what  they  could  of  them  by  argument  and  reason. 
Discipline  was  limited  by  the  Articles  and  Formularies, 
and  in  part  by  the  authority  of  great  divines  and  by 
the  prevailing  opinion  of  the  Church,  and  by  nothing 
else ;  these  were  the  means  which  each  side  had  to 
convince  and  persuade  and  silence  the  other,  and 
each  side  might  hope  that  in  the  course  of  time  its 
sounder  and  better  supported  view  might  prevail. 
But  now  upon  this  state  of  things  comes  from  without 
a  dry,  legal,  narrow  stereotyping,  officially  and  by 
authority,  of  the  sense  to  be  put  upon  part  of  the 
documents  in  the  controversy.  You  appeal  to  the 
Prayer-book ;  your  opponent  tells  you,  Oh,  the  Court 
of  Appeal  has  ruled  against  you  there  :  and  that  part 
of  your  case  is  w^ithdrawn  from  you,  and  he  need 
give  himself  no  trouble  to  argue  the  matter  with  you. 


Ill  PRIVY  COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS  37 

Against  certain  theological  positions,  perhaps  of  great 
weight,  and  theological  evidence,  comes,  not  only  the 
doctrine  of  theological  opponents,  but  the  objection 
that  they  are  bad  law.  The  interpretation  which,  it 
may  be,  we  have  assumed  all  our  lives,  and  which  we 
know  to  be  that  of  Fathers  and  divines,  is  suddenly 
pronounced  not  to  be  legal.  The  decision  does  not 
close  the  controversy,  which  goes  on  as  keenly  and 
with  perhaps  a  little  more  exasperation  than  before ; 
it  simply  stops  off,  by  virtue  of  a  legal  construction, 
a  portion  of  the  field  of  argument  for  one  party,  which 
was,  perhaps,  supposed  to  have  the  strongest  claim  to 
it.  The  Gorham  case  bred  others ;  and  now,  at  last, 
after  fifteen  years,  we  have  got,  as  may  be  seen  in 
Messrs.  Brodrick  and  Fremantle's  book,  a  body  of 
judicial  dicta^  interpretations,  rules  of  exposition,  and 
theological  propositions,  which  have  grown  up  in  the 
course  of  these  cases,  and  which  in  various  ways 
force  a  meaning  and  construction  on  the  theological 
standards  and  language  of  the  Church,  which  in  some 
instances  they  were  never  thought  to  have,  and 
which  they  certainly  never  had  authoritatively  before- 
Besides  her  Articles  and  Prayer-book,  speaking  the 
language  of  divines  and  open  to  each  party  to  interpret 
according  to  the  strength  and  soundness  of  their 
theological  ground,  we  are  getting  a  supplementary 
set  of  legal  limitations  and  glosses,  claiming  to  regulate 
theological  argument  if  not  teaching,  and  imposed 
upon  us  by  the  authority  not  of  the  Church  or  even 
of  Parliament  but  of  the  Judges  of  the  Privy  Council. 


38  PRIVY  COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS  in 

This,  it  strikes  us,  is  a  new  position  of  things  in  the 
Church,  a  new  understanding  and  a  changed  set  of 
conditions  on  which  to  carry  on  controversies  of 
doctrine ;  and  it  seems  to  us  to  have  a  serious  influ- 
ence not  only  on  the  responsibility  of  the  Church  for 
her  own  doctrine,  but  on  the  freedom  and  genuineness 
with  which  questions  as  to  that  doctrine  are  discussed. 
The  Court  is  not  to  blame  for  this  result ;  to  do  it 
justice,  it  has  generally  sought  to  decide  as  little  as  it 
could ;  and  the  interference  of  law  with  the  province 
of  pure  theology  is  to  be  rather  attributed  to  that 
mania  for  deciding,  which  of  late  has  taken  possession 
pretty  equally  of  all  parties.  But  the  indisputable 
result  is  seen  to  be,  after  the  experience  of  fifteen 
years,  that  law  is  taking  a  place  in  our  theological  dis- 
putes and  our  theological  system  which  is  new  to  it 
in  our  theological  history;  law,  not  laid  down  pros- 
pectively in  general  provisions,  but  emerging  indirectly 
and  incidentally  out  of  constructions  and  judicial 
rulings  on  cases  of  pressing  and  hazardous  exigency ; 
law,  applying  its  technical  and  dehberately  narrow 
processes  to  questions  which  of  course  it  cannot  solve, 
but  can  only  throw  into  formal  and  inadequate,  if  not 
unreal,  terms  ;  and  laying  down  the  limits  of  belief 
and  assertion  on  matters  about  which  hearts  burn 
and  souls  tremble,  by  the  mouth  of  judges  whose 
consummate  calmness  and  ability  is  only  equalled 
by  their  profound  and  avowed  want  of  sympathy  for 
the  theology  of  which  their  position  makes  them  the 
expounders  and  final  arbiters.     A  system  has  begun 


m  PRIVY  COUN'CIL  JUDGMENTS  39 

with  respect  to  English  Church  doctrine,  analogous  to 
that  by  which  Lord  Stowell  made  the  recent  law  of 
the  sea,  or  that  by  which  on  a  larger  scale  the  rescripts 
and  decrees  of  the  Popes  moulded  the  great  system 
of  the  canon  law. 

This  is  the  first  thing  that  strikes  us  on  a  compara- 
tive survey  of  this  set  of  decisions.  The  second  point 
is  one  which  at  first  sight  seems  greatly  to  diminish 
the  importance  of  this  new  condition  of  things,  but 
which  on  further  consideration  is  seen  to  have  a  more 
serious  bearing  than  might  have  been  thought.  This 
is,  the  odd  haphazard  way  in  which  points  have  come 
up  for  decision ;  the  sort  of  apparent  chance  which 
has  finally  governed  the  issue  of  the  various  conten- 
tions ;  and  the  infinitesimally  fine  character  of  the 
few  propositions  of  doctrine  to  which  the  Court  has 
given  the  sanction  of  its  ruling.  Knowing  what  we  all 
of  us  cannot  help  knowing,  and  seeing  things  which 
lawyers  and  judges  are  bound  not  to  allow  themselves 
to  see  or  take  account  of,  we  find  it  difficult  to  repress 
the  feeling  of  amazement,  as  we  travel  through  the 
volume,  to  see  Mr  Gorham  let  off,  Mr.  Heath  de- 
prived, then  Dr.  Williams  and  Mr.  Wilson  let  off,  and 
to  notice  the  deUcate  technical  point  which  brought  to 
nought  the  laborious  and  at  one  time  hopeful  efforts 
of  the  worthy  persons  who  tried  to  turn  out  Arch- 
deacon Denison.  And  as  to  the  matter  of  the  deci- 
sions, though  undoubtedly  dicta  of  great  importance 
are  laid  down  in  the  course  of  them,  yet  it  is  curious 
to   observe   the   extremely  minute   and   insignificant 


40  PRIVY  COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS  iii 

statements  on  which  in  the  more  important  cases 
judgment  is  actually  pronounced.  The  Gorham  case 
was  held  to  affect  the  position  of  a  great  party ;  but 
the  language  and  theory  actually  examined  and  allowed 
would  hardly,  in  legal  strictness,  authorise  much  more 
than  the  very  peculiar  views  of  Mr.  Gorham  himself. 
And  in  the  last  case,  the  outside  lay  world  has  hardly 
yet  done  wondering  at  the  consummate  feat  of  legal 
subtlety  by  which  the  issue  whether  the  English 
Church  teaches  that  the  Bible  is  inspired  was  trans- 
muted into  the  question  whether  it  teaches  that  every 
single  part  of  every  single  book  is  inspired.  It  might 
seem  that  rulings,  of  which  the  actual  product  in  the 
way  of  doctrinal  propositions  was  so  small,  were  hardly 
subjects  for  any  keen  interest.  But  it  would  be  short- 
sighted to  regard  the  matter  in  this  way.  In  the  first 
place,  whatever  may  have  happened  as  yet,  it  is  mani- 
festly a  serious  thing  for  Church  of  England  doctrine 
to  have  been  thrown,  on  a  scale  which  is  quite  new, 
into  the  domain  of  a  court  of  law,  to  lie  at  the  mercy 
of  the  confessed  chances  and  uncertainties  of  legal 
interpretation,  with  nothing  really  effective  to  correct 
and  remedy  what  may  possibly  be,  without  any  fault 
in  the  judges,  a  fatally  mischievous  construction  of  the 
text  and  letter  of  her  authoritative  documents.  In  the 
next  place,  no  one  can  fail  to  see,  no  one  in  fact 
affects  to  deny,  that  the  general  result  of  these  recent 
decisions,  capricious  as  their  conclusions  look  at  first 
sight,  has  been  to  make  the  P'ormularies  mean  much 
less  than  they  were  supposed  to  mean.     The  tendencv 


Ill  PKIVY  COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS  41 

of  every  English  court,  appealed  to  not  as  a  court  of 
equity  but  one  of  criminal  jurisdiction,  is  naturally  to 
be  exacting  and  even  narrow  in  the  interpretation  of 
language.  The  general  impression  left  by  these  cases 
is  that  the  lines  of  doctrine  in  the  English  Church  are 
regarded  by  the  judicial  mind  as  very  faint,  and  not 
much  to  be  depended  upon;  and  that  these  judgments 
may  be  the  first  steps  in  that  insensible  process  by 
which  the  unpretending  but  subtle  and  powerful  engine 
of  interpretation  has  been  applied  by  the  courts  to 
give  a  certain  turn  to  law  and  policy  ;  applied,  in  this 
instance,  to  undermine  the  definiteness  and  certainty 
of  doctrine,  and  in  the  end,  the  understanding  itself 
which  has  hitherto  existed  between  the  Church  and 
the  State,  and  has  kept  alive  the  idea  of  her  distinct 
basis,  functions,  and  rights. 

This  is  the  view  of  matters  which  arises  from  an 
examination  of  the  proceedings  contained  in  this 
volume.  What  is  the  argument  urged  in  the  Historical 
Introduction  to  justify  or  recommend  our  acquiescence 
in  it  ?  It  seems  to  us  to  consist  mainly  in  a  one-sided 
and  exaggerated  statement  of  the  Supremacy  claimed 
and  brought  in  by  Henry  VI 1 1.,  and  of  the  effect  in 
theory  and  fact  which  it  ought  to  have  on  our  notion 
of  the  Church  and  of  Church  right.  The  complaint 
of  the  present  state  of  things  is,  that  those  who  may  be 
taken  to  represent  the  interests  of  the  Church  in  such 
a  matter  as  the  character  of  her  teaching  are  practi- 
cally excluded  from  having  any  real  influence  in  the 
decision  of  questions  by  which  the  character  of  that 


42  PRIVY  COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS  in 

teaching  is  affected.  The  answer  is  that  she  has  no 
right  to  claim  a  separate  interest  in  the  matter,  and 
that  the  doctrine  of  the  Royal  Supremacy  was  meant 
to  extinguish,  and  has  extinguished,  any  pretence  to 
such  a  claim.  The  animus  which  pervades  the  work, 
and  which  is  not  obscurely  disclosed  in  such  things  as 
footnotes  and  abridgments  of  legal  arguments,  is  thus 
given — more  freely,  of  course,  than  it  would  be  proper 
to  introduce  in  a  book  like  this — in  some  remarks  of 
Mr.  Brodrick,  one  of  the  editors,  at  a  recent  discus- 
sion of  the  question  of  Ecclesiastical  Appeals  in  a 
committee  of  the  Social  Science  Association.  He  is 
reported  to  have  spoken  as  follows  : — 

The  Church  of  England  being  established  by  law, 
could  not  be  allowed  any  independence  of  action  ;  and 
those  who  wished  for  it  were  like  people  who  wanted  to 
have  their  cake  and  eat  it.  As  to  the  Privy  Council,  he 
had  never  heard  its  decisions  charged  v/ith  error.  What 
was  complained  of  was  that  it  had  declined  to  take  the 
current  opinions  of  theologians  and  make  them  part  of 
the  Thirty-nine  Articles.  There  was  no  need  whatever 
for  the  Privy  Council  to  possess  any  special  theological 
knowledge.  The  only  case  where  that  knowledge  was 
necessary  was  when  it  was  alleged  that  doctrines  had  been 
held  in  the  Church  without  censure.  That  was  a  case  in 
which  considerable  theological  lore  was  required  ;  but  it 
was  within  the  province  of  counsel  to  supply  it.  Divines 
had  now  discovered,  what  lawyers  could  have  told  them 
long  ago,  and  what  he  knew  some  of  them  had  been  told 
— namely,  that  it  would  not  do  to  treat  the  Thirty-nine 
Articles  as  penal  statutes  ;  because,  if  that  were  done,  a 


Ill  PRIVY  COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS  43 

coach  might  be  easily  driven  through  them.  If  they  had 
wished  to  maintain  the  authority  of  the  Articles,  they 
would  have  done  best  to  have  kept  quiet. 

The  present  Court  of  Appeal  is  deduced,  in  the 
Historical  Introduction,  as  a  natural  and  logical  conse- 
quence, from  Henry  VHI.'s  Supremacy.  Undoubtedly 
it  is  scarcely  possible  to  overstate  the  all-grasping 
despotism  of  Henry  VHL,  and  if  a  precedent  for 
anything  reckless  of  all  separate  rights  and  independ- 
ence should  be  wanted,  it  would  never  be  sought  in 
vain  if  looked  for  in  the  policy  and  legislation  of  that 
reign.  So  far  the  editors  are  right ;  the  power  over 
religion  claimed  by  Henry  VHI.  will  carry  them 
wherever  they  want  to  go ;  it  will  give  them,  if  they 
need  it,  as  a  still  more  logical  and  legitimate  develop- 
ment of  the  Supremacy,  the  Court  of  High  Commis- 
sion. Only  they  ought  to  have  remembered,  as  fair 
historians,  that  even  in  the  days  of  the  Supremacy  the 
distinct  nature  and  business  of  the  Church  and  of 
Churchmen  was  never  denied.  Laymen  were  given 
powers  over  the  Church  and  in  the  Church  which 
were  new ;  but  the  distinct  province  of  the  Church,  if 
abridged  and  put  under  new  control,  was  not  abolished. 
Side  by  side  with  the  facts  showing  the  Supremacy  and 
its  exercise  are  a  set  of  facts,  for  those  who  choose  to 
see  them,  showing  that  the  Church  was  still  recog- 
nised, even  by  Henry  VHI.,  as  a  body  which  he  had 
not  created,  which  he  was  obliged  to  take  account 
of,  and  which  filled  a  place  utterly  different  from  every 
other  body  in  the  State.     Henry  VHI.  played  the 


44  TRIVY  COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS  in 

tyrant  with  his  Churchmen  as  he  did  with  his  Parha- 
ment  and  with  everybody  else ;  and  Churchmen,  like 
everybody  else,  submitted  to  him.  But  the  "  Im- 
perialism" of  Henry  VIII.,  though  it  went  beyond  even 
the  Imperialism  of  Justinian  and  Charlemagne  in  its 
encroachments  on  the  spiritual  power,  as  little  denied 
the  fact  of  that  power  as  they  did.  He  recognised  the 
distinct  place  and  claims  of  the  spiritualty  ;  and,  as  we 
suppose  that  even  the  editors  of  this  volume  hardly 
feel  themselves  bound  to  make  out  the  consistency  of 
Henry,  they  might  have  spared  themselves  the  weak 
and  not  very  fair  attempt  to  get  rid  of  the  force  of  the 
remarkable  words  in  which  this  recognition  is  recorded 
in  the  first  Statute  of  Appeals  (24  Henry  VIII.  c.  12). 
The  words  would,  no  doubt,  be  worth  but  little,  were  it 
not  that  as  a  matter  of  fact  a  spiritualty  did  act  and 
judge  and  lay  down  doctrine,  and  even  while  yielding 
to  unworthy  influence  did  keep  up  their  corporate 
existence. 

But  when  the  ecclesiastical  legislation  of  Henry 
VIII.  is  referred  to,  not  merely  as  the  historical 
beginning  of  a  certain  state  of  things  which  has  under- 
gone great  changes  in  the  course  of  events,  but  as 
affording  a  sort  of  idea  and  normal  pattern  to  which 
our  own  arrangements  ought  to  conform,  as  supplying 
us  with  a  theory  of  Church  and  State  which  holds 
good  at  least  against  the  Church,  it  seems  hard  that 
the  Church  alone  should  not  have  the  benefit  of  the 
entire  alteration  of  circumstances  since  that  theory 
was  a  reality.     Those  who  talk  about  the  Supremacy 


Ill  PRIVY  COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS  45 

ought  to  remember  what  the  Supremacy  pretended  to 
be.  It  was  over  all  causes  and  all  persons,  civil  as  well 
as  ecclesiastical.  It  held  good  certainly  in  theory,  and 
to  a  great  extent  in  practice,  against  the  temporalty  as 
much  as  against  the  spiritualty.  Why  then  are  we  to 
invoke  the  Supremacy  as  then  understood,  in  a  ques- 
tion about  courts  of  spiritual  appeals,  and  not  in 
questions  about  other  courts  and  other  powers  in  the 
nation  ?  If  the  Supremacy,  claimed  and  exercised  as 
Henry  claimed  and  exercised  it,  is  good  against  the 
Church,  it  is  good  against  many  other  things  besides. 
If  the  Church  inherits  bonds  and  obligations,  not 
merely  by  virtue  of  distinct  statutes,  but  by  the  force 
of  a  general  vague  arbitrary  theory  of  royal  power, 
why  has  that  power  been  expelled,  or  transformed  into 
a  mere  fiction  of  law,  in  all  other  active  branches  of  the 
national  life  ?  Unless  the  Church  is  simply,  what  even 
Henry  VIII.  did  not  regard  it,  a  creation  and  delegate 
of  the  national  power,  without  any  roots  and  constitu- 
tion of  its  own,  why  should  the  Church  be  denied  the 
benefit  of  the  common  sense,  and  the  change  in  ideas 
and  usage,  which  have  been  so  largely  appealed  to  in 
civil  matters  ?  Why  are  we  condemned  to  a  theory 
which  is  not  only  out  of  date  and  out  of  harmony  with 
all  the  traditions  and  convictions  of  modern  times, 
but  which  was  in  its  own  time  tyrannous,  revolu- 
tionary, and  intolerable?  Arguments  in  favour  of 
the  present  Court,  drawn  from  the  reason  of  the  thing, 
and  the  comparative  fitness  of  the  judges  for  their 
gfiice,  if  we  do  not  agree  with  them,  at  least  we  can 


46  PRIVY  COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS  iii 

understand.  But  precedents  and  arguments  from  the 
Supremacy  of  Henry  VIII.  suggest  the  question  whether 
those  who  use  them  are  ready  to  be  taken  at  their 
word  and  to  have  back  that  Supremacy  as  it  was ;  and 
whether  the  examples  of  pohcy  of  that  reign  are 
seemly  to  quote  as  adequate  measures  of  the  liberty 
and  rights  of  any  set  of  Englishmen. 

The  question  really  calling  for  solution  is — How  to 
reconcile  the  just  freedom  of  individual  teachers  in  the 
Church  with  the  maintenance  of  the  right  and  duty  of 
the  Church  to  uphold  the  substantial  meaning  of  her 
body  of  doctrine  ?  In  answering  this  question  we  can 
get  no  help  from  this  volume.  It  simply  argues  that 
the  present  is  practically  the  best  of  all  possible  courts  ; 
that  it  is  a  great  improvement,  which  probably  it  is, 
on  the  Courts  of  Delegates  ;  and  that  great  confidence 
ought  to  be  felt  in  its  decisions.  We  are  further 
shown  how  jealously  and  carefully  the  judges  have 
guarded  the  right  of  the  individual  teacher.  But  it 
seems  to  us,  according  to  the  views  put  forward  in 
this  book,  that  as  the  price  of  all  this — of  great 
learning,  weight,  and  ability  in  the  judges — of  great 
care  taken  of  liberty — the  Church  is  condemned  to  an 
interpretation  of  the  Royal  Supremacy  which  floats 
between  the  old  arbitrary  view  of  it  and  the  modern 
Liberal  one,  and  which  uses  each,  as  it  happens  to  be 
most  convenient,  against  the  claim  of  the  Church  to 
protect  her  doctrine  and  exert  a  real  influence  on  the 
authoritative  declaration  of  it.  We  all  need  liberty, 
and  we  all  ought  to  be  ready  to  give  the  reasonable 


Ill  PRIVY  COUNCIL  JUDGMENTS  47 

liberty  which  we  profess  to  claim  for  ourselves.  But 
it  is  a  heavy  price  to  pay  for  it,  if  the  right  and  the 
power  is  to  be  taken  out  of  the  hands  of  the  Church 
to  declare  what  is  the  real  meaning  of  what  she 
supposes  herself  bound  to  teach. 


IV 


SIR  JOHN  COLERIDGE  ON  THE  PURCHAS 

CASE^ 

No  one  has  more  right  to  speak  with  authority,  or 
more  deserves  to  be  hstened  to  at  a  difficult  and 
critical  moment  for  the  Church,  than  Sir  J.  T. 
Coleridge.  An  eminent  lawyer,  and  a  most  earnest 
and  well-informed  Churchman,  he  combines  in  an 
unusual  way  claims  on  the  attention  of  all  who  care 
for  the  interests  of  rehgion,  and  for  those,  too,  which 
are  so  deeply  connected  with  them,  the  interests  of 
England.  The  troubles  created  by  the  recent  judg- 
ment have  induced  him  to  come  forward  from  his 
retirement  with  words  of  counsel  and  warning. 

The  gist  of  his  Letter  may  be  shortly  stated.  He 
is  inclined  to  think  the  decision  arrived  at  by  the 
Judicial  Committee  a  mistaken  one.  But  he  thinks 
that  it  would  be  a  greater  and  a  worse  mistake  to 
make  this  decision,  wrong  as  it  may  be,  a  reason  for 

1  Remarks  on  Some  Parts  of  the  Report  of  the  Judicial  Com- 
mittee in  the  Case  of ' '  Elphinstone  against  Purchas."  A  Letter  to 
Canon  Liddon,  from  the  Right  Hon.  Sir  J.  T.  Coleridge. 
Guardian,  5th  April  1871, 


iv^      SIR  J.  COLERIDGE  OTs  THE  PURCHAS  CASE       49 

looking  favourably  on  disestablishment  as  a  remedy 
for  what  is  complained  of.  We  are  glad  to  note  the 
judgment  of  so  fair  an  observer  and  so  distinguished 
a  lawyer,  himself  a  member  of  the  Privy  Council,  both 
on  the  intrinsic  suitableness  and  appropriateness  of 
the  position  ^  which  has  been  ruled  to  be  illegal,  and 
on  the  unsatisfactoriness  of  the  interpretation  itself,  as 
a  matter  of  judicial  reading  and  construction.  A 
great  deal  has  been  said,  and  it  is  plain  that  the  topic 
is  inexhaustible,  on  the  unimportance  of  a  position. 
We  agree  entirely — on  condition  that  people  remember 
the  conditions  and  consequences  of  their  assertion. 
Every  single  outward  accompaniment  of  worship 
may,  if  you  carry  your  assertion  to  its  due  level, 
be  said  to  be  in  itself  utterly  unimportant ;  place  and 
time  and  form  and  attitude  are  all  things  not  belong- 
ing to  the  essence  of  the  act  itself,  and  are  indefinitely 
changeable,  as,  in  fact,  the  changes  in  them  have 
been  countless.  Kneeling  is  not  of  the  essence  of 
prayer,  but  imagine,  first  prohibiting  the  posture  of 
kneeling,  and  then  remonstrating  with  those  who 
complained  of  the  prohibition,  on  the  ground  of 
postures  being  unimportant.  It  is  obvious  that  when 
you  have  admitted  to  the  full  that  a  position  is  in 
itself  unimportant,  all  kinds  of  reasons  may  come  in 
on  the  further  question  whether  it  is  right,  fitting, 
natural.  There  are  reasons  why  the  position  which 
has  been  so  largely  adopted  of  late  is  the  natural  and 

^  The  Eastward  Position  at  the  celebration  of  the  Holy  Com- 
munion. 

VOL.  II  E 


50  SIR  JOHN  COLERIDGE  iv 

suitable  one.     Sir  John  Coleridge  states  them  admir- 
ably :— 

As  to  the  place  of  standing  at  the  consecration,  my 
feeling  is  with  them.  It  seems  to  me  not  desirable  to 
make  it  essential  or  even  important  that  the  people 
should  see  the  breaking  of  the  bread,  or  the  taking  the 
cup  into  the  hands  of  the  priest,  and  positively  mis- 
chievous to  encourage  them  in  gazing  on  him,  or  watch- 
ing him  with  critical  eyes  while  so  employed.  I  much 
prefer  the  spirit  of  the  Rubric  of  1549 — First  Book  of 
Edward  VI. — which  says,  "These  words  before  rehearsed 
are  to  be  said  turning  still  to  the  Altar,  without  any 
elevation,  or  showing  the  Sacraments  to  the  people," 
The  use  now  enforced,  I  think,  tends  to  deprive  the 
most  solemn  rite  of  our  religion  of  one  of  its  most 
solemn  particulars.  Surely,  whatever  school  we  belong 
to,  and  even  if  we  consider  the  whole  rite  merely  com- 
memorative, it  is  a  very  solemn  idea  to  conceive  the 
priest  at  the  head  of  his  flock,  and,  as  it  were,  a  shep- 
herd leading  them  on  in  heart  and  spirit,  imploring  for 
them  and  with  them  the  greatest  blessing  which  man  is 
capable  of  receiving  on  earth  ;  he  alone  uttering  the 
prayer — they  meanwhile  kneeling  all,  and  in  deep  silence 
listening,  not  gazing,  rather  with  closed  eyes — and  with 
their  whole  undistractcd  attention,  joining  in  the  prayer 
with  one  heart  and  without  sound  until  the  united 
"  Amen  "  breaks  from  them  at  the  close,  and  seals  their 
union  and  assent. 

But,  of  course,  comes  the  further  question,  whether 
an  ICnglish  clergyman  is  authorised  to  use  it.  He  is 
not  authorised  if  the  Prayer  Book  tells  him   not  to. 


IV  ON  THE  PURCHAS  CASE  51 

Of  that  there  is  no  question.  But  if  the  Prayer  Book 
not  only  seems  to  give  him  the  Hberty,  but,  by  the 
prima  facie  look  of  its  words,  seems  to  prescribe  it, 
the  harshness  of  a  ruling  which  summarily  and  under 
penalties  prohibits  it  is  not  to  be  smoothed  down  by 
saying  that  the  matter  is  unimportant  Sir  John- 
Coleridge's  view  of  the  two  points  will  be  read  with 
interest : — 

You  will  understand,  of  course,  that  I  write  in 
respect  of  the  Report  recently  made  by  the  Judicial 
Committee  in  the  Purchas  case.  I  am  not  about  to 
defend  it.  No  one,  however,  ought  to  pronounce  a  con- 
demnation of  the  solemn  judgment  of  such  a  tribunal 
without  much  consideration ;  and  this  remark  applies 
with  special  force  to  myself,  well  knowing  as  I  do  those 
from  whom  it  proceeded,  and  having  withdrawn  from 
sharing  in  the  labours  of  the  Committee  only  because 
age  had  impaired,  with  the  strength  of  my  body,  the 
faculties  also  of  my  mind  ;  and  so  disabled  me  from  the 
proper  discharge  of  any  judicial  duties.  With  this  ad- 
mission on  my  part,  I  yet  venture  to  say  that  I  think 
Mr.  Purchas  has  not  had  justice  done  to  him  in  two 
main  points  of  the  late  appeal ;  I  mean  the  use  of  the 
vestments  complained  of  and  the  side  of  the  communion- 
table which  he  faced  when  consecrating  the  elements  for 
the  Holy  Communion.  Before  I  state  my  reasons,  let 
me  premise  that  I  am  no  Ritualist,  in  the  now  conven- 
tional use  of  the  term.  I  do  not  presume  to  judge  of  the 
motives  of  those  to  whom  that  name  is  applied.  From 
the  information  of  common  but  undisputed  report  as  to 
some  of  the  most  conspicuous,  I  believe  them  entitled  to 


52  SIR  JOHN  COLERIDGE  iv 

all  praise  for  their  pastoral  devotedness  and  their 
laborious,  self-denying  lives  ;  still,  I  do  not  shrink  from 
saying  that  I  think  them  misguided,  and  the  cause  of 
mischief  in  the  Church.  So  much  for  my  feeling  in 
regard  to  the  vestments.  I  prefer  the  surplice  at  all 
times  and  in  all  ministrations. 

This  is  my  feeling — and  I  see  no  word  in  the  sober 
language  of  our  rubric  which  interferes  with  it — but  my 
feeling  is  of  no  importance  in  the  argument,  and  I  men- 
tion it  only  in  candour,  to  show  in  what  spirit  I  approach 
the  argument. 

Now  Mr.  Purchas  has  been  tried  before  the  Com- 
mittee for  offences  alleged  to  have  been  committed 
against  the  provisions  of  the  "Act  of  Uniformity"  ;  of 
this  Act  the  Common  Prayer  Book  is  part  and  parcel. 
As  to  the  vestments,  his  conduct  was  alleged  to  be  in 
derogation  of  the  rubric  as  to  the  ornaments  of  the 
Church  and  the  ministers  thereof,  which  ordains  that 
such  shall  be  retained  and  be  in  use  as  were  in  the 
Church  of  England  by  the  authority  of  Parliament  in  the 
second  year  of  the  reign  of  King  Edward  VI.  The  Act 
of  Uniformity  is  to  be  construed  by  the  same  rules 
exactly  as  any  Act  passed  in  the  last  session  of  Parlia- 
ment. The  clause  in  question  (by  which  I  mean  the 
rubric  in  question)  is  perfectly  unambiguous  in  language, 
free  from  all  difliculty  as  to  construction  ;  it  therefore 
lets  in  no  argument  as  to  intention  other  than  that  which 
the  words  themselves  import.  There  might  be  a  seem- 
ing difficulty  in  fad,  because  it  might  not  be  known 
what  vestments  were  in  use  by  authority  of  Parliament 
in  the  second  year  of  the  reign  of  King  Edward  VI.  j 
but  this  difficulty  has  been  removed.      It  is  conceded  in 


IV  ON  THE  PURCHAS  CASE  53 

the  Report  that  the  vestments,  the  use  of  which  is  now 
condemned,  were  in  use  by  authority  of  Parhament  in 
that  year.  Having  that  fact,  you  are  bound  to  construe 
the  rubric  as  if  those  vestments  were  specifically  named 
in  it,  instead  of  being  only  referred  to.  If  an  Act  should 
be  passed  to-morrow  that  the  uniform  of  the  Guards 
should  henceforth  be  such  as  was  ordered  for  them  by 
authority  and  used  by  them  in  the  ist  George  I.,  you 
would  first  ascertain  what  that  uniform  was ;  and, 
having  ascertained  it,  you  would  not  inquire  into  the 
changes  which  may  have  been  made,  many  or  few,  with 
or  without  lawful  authority,  between  the  ist  George  I. 
and  the  passing  of  the  new  Act.  All  these,  that  Act, 
specifying  the  earlier  date,  would  have  made  wholly 
immaterial.  It  would  have  seemed  strange,  I  suppose, 
if  a  commanding  officer,  disobeying  the  statute,  had  said 
in  his  defence,  "  There  have  been  many  changes  since  the 
reign  of  George  I.  ;  and  as  to  '  retaining,'  we  put  a  gloss 
on  that,  and  thought  it  might  mean  only  retaining  to  the 
Queen's  use ;  so  we  have  put  the  uniforms  safely  in 
store."  But  I  think  it  would  have  seemed  more  strange 
to  punish  and  mulct  him  severely  if  he  had  obeyed  the 
law  and  put  no  gloss  on  plain  words. 

This  case  stands  on  the  same  principle.  The  rubric 
indeed  seems  to  me  to  imply  with  some  clearness  that  in 
the  long  interval  between  Edward  VI.  and  the  14th 
Charles  II.  there  had  been  many  changes;  but  it  does 
not  stay  to  specify  them,  or  distinguish  between  what 
was  mere  evasion  and  what  was  lawful ;  it  quietly  passes 
them  all  by,  and  goes  back  to  the  legalised  usage  of  the 
second  year  of  Edward  VI.  What  had  prevailed  since, 
whether  by  an  Archbishop's  gloss,  by  Commissions,  or 


5i  SIR  JOHN  COLERIDGE  iv 

even  Statutes,  whether,  in  short,  legal  or  illegal,  it  makes 
quite  immaterial. 

I  forbear  to  go  through  the  long  inquiry  which 
these  last  words  remind  one  of — not,  I  am  sure,  out  of 
any  disrespectful  feeling  to  the  learned  and  reverend 
authors  of  the  Report,  but  because  it  seems  to  me  wholly 
irrelevant  to  the  point  for  decision.  This  alone  I  must 
add,  that  even  were  the  inquiry  relevant,  the  authorities 
on  which  they  rely  do  not  appear  to  me  so  clear  or 
cogent,  nor  the  analogies  relied  on  so  just,  as  to  warrant 
the  conclusion  arrived  at.  For  it  should  never  be  for- 
gotten that  the  defendant  in  a  criminal  case,  acquitted 
as  to  this  charge  by  the  learned  judge  below,  was 
entitled  to  every  presumption  in  his  favour,  and  could 
not  properly  be  condemned  but  by  a  judgment  free  from 
all  reasonable  doubt.  And  this  remark  acquires  ad- 
ditional strength  because  the  judgment  will  be  final  not 
only  on  him  but  on  the  whole  Church  for  all  time,  unless 
reversed  by  the  Legislature. 

On  the  second  point  he  thus  speaks,  in  terms 
which  for  their  guarded  moderation  are  all  the  more 
worth  notice : — 

Upon  the  second  point  I  have  less  to  say,  though 
it  is  to  me  much  the  most  important.  The  Report,  I 
think,  cannot  be  shown  conclusively  to  be  wrong  here, 
as  it  may  be  on  the  other  ;  still  it  does  not  seem  to  me 
to  be  shown  conclusively  to  be  right.  You  have  your- 
self given  no  reason  in  your  second  letter  of  the  8th 
March  for  doubting  at  least. 

Let  me  add  that,  in  my  opinion,  on  such  a  question 
as  this,  where  a  conclusion  is  to  be  arrived  at  upon  the 


IV  ON  THE  PURCHAS  CASE  55 

true  meaning  of  Rubrics  framed  more  than  two  centuries 
since,  and  certainly  not  with  a  view  to  any  such  minute 
criticism  as  on  these  occasions  is  and  must  be  applied 
to  them,  and  where  the  evidence  of  facts  is  by  no  means 
clear,  none  probably  can  be  arrived  at  free  from  reason- 
able objection.  What  is  the  consequence  ?  It  will  be 
asked.  Is  the  question  to  receive  no  judicial  solution  ? 
I  am  not  afraid  to  answer,  Better  far  that  it  should 
receive  none  than  that  injustice  should  be  done.  The 
principles  of  English  law  furnish  the  practical  solution  : 
dismiss  the  party  charged,  unless  his  conviction  can  be 
based  on  grounds  on  which  reasonable  and  competent 
minds  can  rest  satisfied  and  without  scruple.  And  what 
mighty  mischief  will  result  to  countervail  the  application 
of  this  rule  of  justice  ?  For  two  centuries  our  Church 
has  subsisted  without  an  answer  to  the  question  which 
alone  gives  importance  to  this  inquiry,  and  surely  has 
not  been  without  God's  blessing  for  that  time,  in  spite  of 
all  much  more  serious  shortcomings.  Let  us  remember 
that  Charity,  or  to  use  perhaps  a  better  word,  Love,  is 
the  greatest  of  all ;  if  that  prevail  there  need  be  little 
fear  for  our  Faith  or  our  Hope. 

Having  said  this  much,  Sir  John  Coleridge  pro- 
ceeds to  the  second,  and  indeed  the  main  object  of 
his  letter — to  remonstrate  against  exaggeration  in 
complaint,  both  of  the  particular  decision  and  of  the 
Court  which  gave  it : — 

I  now  return  to  your  letter.  You  proceed  to  attempt 
to  show  that  the  words  of  Keble  to  yourself,  which  you 
cite,  are  justified  by  remarks  in  this  Report  and  some 
previous  judgments  of  the   same  tribunal,  which  appear 


56  SIR  JOHN  COLERIDGE  iv 

to  you  so  inconsistent  with  each  other  as  to  make  it  difficult 
to  believe  that  the  Court  was  impartial,  or  "  incapable  of 
regarding  the  documents  before  it  in  the  light  of  a  plastic 
material,  which  might  be  made  to  support  conclusions 
held  to  be  advisable  at  the  moment,  and  on  independent 
grounds."  I  wish  these  words  had  never  been  written. 
They  will,  I  fear,  be  understood  as  conveying  your 
formed  opinions  ;  and  coming  from  you,  and  addressed 
to  minds  already  excited  and  embittered,  they  will  be 
readily  accepted,  though  they  import  the  heaviest  charges 
against  judges — some  of  them  bishops — all  of  high  and 
hitherto  unimpeached  character.  A  very  long  experience 
of  judicial  life  makes  me  know  that  judges  will  often 
provoke  and  bitterly  disappoint  both  the  suitors  before 
them  and  the  public,  when  discharging  their  duty  honestly 
and  carefully,  and  a  man  is  scarcely  fit  for  the  station 
unless  he  can  sit  tolerably  easy  under  censures  which 
even  these  may  pass  upon  him.  Yet,  imputations  of 
partiality  or  corruption  are  somewhat  hard  to  bear  when 
they  are  made  by  persons  of  your  station  and  character. 
When  the  Judicial  Committee  sits  on  appeals  from  the 
Spiritual  Courts,  it  may  certainly  be  under  God's  dis- 
pleasure, the  members  7)iay  be  visited  with  judicial  blind- 
ness, and  deprived  of  the  integrity  which  in  other  times 
and  cases  they  manifest.  Against  such  a  supposition 
there  is  no  direct  argument,  and  I  will  not  enter  into 
such  a  disputation.  I  have  so  much  confidence  in  your 
generosity  and  candour,  on  reflection,  as  to  believe  you 
would  not  desire  I  should. 

In  the  individual  case  I  simply  protest  against  the 
insinuation.  I  add  a  word  or  two  by  way  of  general 
observation. 


IV  ON  THE  PURCHAS  CASE  57 

No  doubt  you  have  read  the  judgments  in  all  the 
cases  you  allude  to  carefully ;  but  have  you  read  the 
pleadings  and  arguments  of  the  counsel,  so  as  to  know 
accurately  the  points  raised  for  the  consideration  of  those 
who  were  to  decide  ?  To  know  the  offence  charged  and 
the  judgment  pronounced  may  suffice  in  some  cases  for 
an  opinion  by  a  competent  person,  whether  the  one 
warranted  the  other  ;  but  more  is  required  to  warrant 
the  imputation  of  inconsistency,  partiality,  or  indirect 
motives.  He  who  takes  this  on  himself  should  know 
further  how  the  pleadings  and  the  arguments  presented 
the  case  for  judgment,  and  made  this  or  that  particular 
relevant  in  the  discussion.  Every  one  at  all  familiar 
with  this  matter  knows  that  a  judgment  not  uncommonly 
fails  to  reflect  the  private  opinion  of  the  judge  on  the 
whole  of  a  great  point,  because  the  issues  of  law  or  fact 
actually  brought  before  him,  and  which  alone  he  was 
bound  to  decide,  did  not  bring  this  before  him.  And 
this  rule,  always  binding,  is,  of  course,  never  more  so 
than  in  regard  to  a  Court  of  Final  Appeal,  which  should 
be  careful  not  to  conclude  more  than  is  regularly  before 
it.  Let  me  add  that  a  just  and  considerate  person  will 
wholly  disregard  the  gossip  which  flies  about  in  regard 
to  cases  exciting  much  interest ;  passing  words  in  the 
course  of  an  argument,  forgotten  when  the  judgment 
comes  to  be  considered,  are  too  often  caught  up,  as 
having  guided  the  final  determination. 

Such  words  are  a  just  rebuke  to  much  of  the  incon- 
siderate talk  which  follows  on  any  public  act  which 
touches  the  feelings,  perhaps  the  highest  and  purest 
feelings  of  men  with  deep  convictions.     Perhaps  Mr. 


58  SIR  JOHN  COLERIDGE  iv 

Liddon's  words  were  unguarded  ones.  But  at  the 
same  time  it  is  necessary  to  state  without  disguise 
what  is  the  truth  in  this  matter.  It  is  necessary  for 
the  sake  of  justice  and  historical  truth.  The  Court 
of  Final  Appeal  is  not  like  other  courts.  It  is  not  a 
pure  and  simple  court  of  law,  though  it  is  composed 
of  great  lawyers.  It  is  doubtless  a  court  where  their 
high  training  and  high  professional  honour  come  in, 
as  they  do  elsewhere.  But  great  lawyers  are  men, 
partisans  and  politicians,  statesmen,  if  you  like ;  and 
this  is  a  court  where  they  are  not  precluded,  in  the 
same  degree  as  they  are  in  the  regular  courts  by  the 
habits  and  prescriptions  of  the  place,  from  thinking 
of  what  comes  before  them  in  its  relation  to  public 
affairs.  It  is  no  mere  invention  of  disappointed 
partisans,  it  is  no  idle  charge  of  wilful  unfairness,  to 
say  that  considerations  of  high  policy  come  into  their 
deliberations ;  it  has  been  the  usual  language,  ever 
since  the  Gorham  case,  of  men  who  cared  little  for 
the  subject-matter  of  the  questions  debated  ;  it  is  the 
language  of  those  who  urge  the  advantages  of  the 
Court.  "  It  is  a  court,"  as  the  Bishop  of  Manchester 
said  the  other  day,  speaking  in  its  praise,  "  composed 
of  men  who  look  at  things  not  merely  with  the  eyes  of 
lawyers,  but  also  with  the  eyes  of  statesmen."  Pre- 
cisely so ;  and  for  that  reason  they  must  be  considered 
to  have  the  responsibilities,  not  only  of  lawyers,  but 
of  statesmen,  and  their  acts  are  proportionably  open 
to  discussion.  Sir  John  Coleridge  urges  the  impossi- 
bility of  any  other  court ;  and  certainly  till  we  could 


IV  ox  THE  PURCHAS  CASE  59 

be  induced  to  trust  an  ecclesiastical  court,  composed 
of  bishops  or  clergymen,  in  a  higher  degree  than  we 
could  do  at  present,  we  see  no  alternative.  But  to 
say  that  a  clerical  court  would  be  no  improvement  is 
not  to  prove  that  the  present  court  is  a  satisfactory 
one.  It  may  be  difficult  under  our  present  circum- 
stances to  reform  it.  But  though  we  may  have  reasons 
for  making  the  best  of  it,  we  may  be  allowed  to  say 
that  it  is  a  singularly  ill-imagined  and  ill-constructed 
court,  and  one  in  which  the  great  features  of  English 
law  and  justice  are  not  so  conspicuous  as  they  are 
elsewhere.  Suitors  do  not  complain  in  other  courts 
either  of  the  ruling,  or  sometimes  of  the  language  of 
judges,  as  they  complain  in  this.  But  when  this  is 
made  a  ground  for  joining  W'ith  the  enemies  of  all 
that  the  English  Church  holds  dear,  to  bring  about  a 
great  break-up  of  the  existing  state  of  things,  we  agree 
with  Sir  John  Coleridge  in  thinking  that  a  great  mis- 
take is  made ;  and  if  care  is  not  taken,  it  may  be  an 
irreparable  one.     He  writes  : — 

I  hasten  to  my  conclusion  too  long  delayed,  but  a 
word  must  still  be  added  on  a  subject  of  not  less  con- 
sequence than  any  I  have  yet  touched  on.  You  say, 
"  Churchmen  will  to  a  very  great  extent  indeed  find 
relief  from  the  dilemma  in  a  third  course,  viz.  co-opera- 
tio7i  with  the  political  fo)'ces^  which,  year  by  year,  more 
and  more  steadily  are  working  towards  disestablishment. 
This  is  not  a  menace  ;  it  is  the  statement  of  a  simple 
fact."  1  am  bound  to  believe,  and  I  do  believe,  you  do 
not  intend  this  as  a  menace  ;  but  such  a  statement  of  a 


GO  SIR  JOHN  COLERIDGE  iv 

future  course  to  depend  on  a  contingency  cannot  but 
read  very  much  like  one — and  against  your  intention  it 
may  well  be  understood  as  such.  You  do  not  say  that 
yon  are  one  who  will  co-operate  with  the  political  party 
which  now  seeks  to  disestablish  the  Church  in  accom- 
plishing its  purpose,  and  I  do  not  suppose  you  ever  will. 
But  on  behalf,  not  so  much  of  the  clergy  as  of  the  laity 
— on  behalf  of  the  worshippers  in  our  churches,  of  the 
sick  to  be  visited  at  home — of  the  poor  in  their  cottages, 
of  our  children  in  their  schools — of  our  society  in  general, 
I  entreat  those  of  the  clergy  who  are  now  feeling  the 
most  acutely  in  this  matter,  not  to  suffer  their  minds  to 
be  so  absorbed  by  the  present  grievance  as  to  take  no 
thought  of  the  evils  of  disestablishment.  I  am  not 
foolishly  blind  to  the  faults  of  the  clergy — indeed  I  fear 
I  am  sometimes  censorious  in  regard  to  them — and  some 
of  their  faults  I  do  think  may  be  referable  to  Establish- 
ment ;  the  possession  of  house  and  land,  and  a  sort  of 
independence  of  their  parishioners,  in  some  cases  seems 
to  tend  to  secularity.  I  regret  sometimes  their  partisan- 
ship at  elections,  their  speeches  at  public  dinners.  But 
what  good  gift  of  God  is  not  liable  to  abuse  from  men  ? 
Taken  as  a  whole,  we  have  owed,  and  we  do  owe,  under 
Him,  to  our  Established  clergy  more  than  we  can  ever 
repay,  much  of  it  rendered  possible  by  their  Establish- 
ment. I  may  refer,  and  now  with  special  force,  to 
Education — their  services  in  this  respect  no  one  denies 
— and  but  for  Establishment  these,  I  think,  could  not 
have  been  so  effectively  and  systematically  rendered. 
We  are  now  in  a  great  crisis  as  to  this  all -important 
matter.  Concurring,  as  I  do  heartily,  in  the  praise 
which  has  been  bestowed  on  Mr.  Forster,  and  expecting 


IV  ON  THE  PURCHAS  CASE  61 

that  his  great  and  arduous  office  will  be  discharged  with 
perfect  impartiality  by  him,  and  with  a  just  sense  of  how 
much  is  due  to  the  clergy  in  this  respect,  still  it  cannot 
be  denied  that  the  powers  conferred  by  the  Legislature 
on  the  holder  of  it  are  alarmingly  great,  even  if  neces- 
sary ;  and  who  shall  say  in  what  a  spirit  they  may  be 
exercised  by  his  successor  ?  For  the  general  upholding 
of  religious  education,  in  emergencies  not  improbable, 
to  whom  can  we  look  in  general  so  confidently  as  to  the 
parochial  clergy  ?  I  speak  now  specially  in  regard  to 
parishes  such  as  I  am  most  familiar  with,  in  agricultural 
districts,  small,  not  largely  endowed,  sometimes  without 
resident  gentry,  and  with  the  land  occupied  by  rack- 
renting  farmers,  indifferent  or  hostile  to  education. 

In  what  Sir  John  Coleridge  urges  against  the  fatal 
step  of  welcoming  disestablishment  under  an  impatient 
sense  of  injustice  we  need  not  say  that  we  concur 
most  earnestly.  But  it  cannot  be  too  seriously  con- 
sidered by  those  who  see  the  mischief  of  disestablish- 
ment, that  as  Sir  John  Coleridge  also  says,  the  English 
Church  is,  in  one  sense,  a  divided  one ;  and  that  to 
pursue  a  policy  of  humiliating  and  crippling  one  of 
its  great  parties  must  at  last  bring  mischief.  The 
position  of  the  High  Church  party  is  a  remarkable 
one.  It  has  had  more  against  it  than  its  rivals;  yet 
it  is  probably  the  strongest  of  them  all.  It  is  said, 
probably  with  reason,  to  be  the  unpopular  party.  It 
has  been  the  stock  object  of  abuse  and  sarcasm  with 
a  large  portion  of  the  press.  It  has  been  equally 
obnoxious  to  Radical  small  shopkeepers   and  "true 


62      SIR  J.  COLERIDGE  ON  THE  PURCHAS  CASE       iv 

blue"  farmers  and  their  squires.  It  has  been  mobbed 
in  churches  and  censured  in  Parhament.  Things 
have  gone  against  it,  ahnost  uniformly,  before  the 
tribunals.  And  unfortunately  it  cannot  be  said  that 
it  has  been  without  its  full  share  of  folly  and  extrava- 
gance in  some  of  its  members.  And  yet  it  is  the 
party  which  has  grown ;  which  has  drawn  some  of  its 
antagonists  to  itself,  and  has  reacted  on  the  ideas  and 
habits  of  others ;  its  members  have  gradually,  as  a 
matter  of  course,  risen  into  important  post  and  power. 
And  it  is  to  be  noticed  that,  as  a  party,  it  has  been 
the  most  tolerant.  All  parties  are  in  their  nature 
intolerant ;  none  more  so,  where  critical  points  arise, 
than  Liberal  ones.  But  in  spite  of  the  Dean  of 
Westminster's  surprise  at  High  Churchmen  claiming 
to  be  tolerant,  we  still  think  that,  in  the  first  place, 
they  are  really  much  less  inclined  to  meddle  with 
their  neighbours  than  others  of  equally  strong  and 
deep  convictions ;  and  further,  that  they  have  become 
so  more  and  more  ;  and  they  have  accepted  the  lessons 
of  their  experience ;  they  have  thrown  off,  more  than 
any  strong  religious  body,  the  intolerance  which  was 
natural  to  everybody  once,  and  have  learned,  better 
than  they  did  at  one  time,  to  bear  with  what  they 
dislike  and  condemn.  If  a  party  like  this  comes  to 
feel  itself  dealt  with  harshly  and  unfairly,  sacrificed  to 
popular  clamour  or  the  animosity  of  inveterate  and 
unscrupulous  opponents,  it  is  certain  that  we  shall  be 
in  great  danger. 


MR.  GLADSTONE'S  LETTER  ON  THE 
ENGLISH  CHURCH  1 

Mr.  Gladstone's  Letter,  read  at  the  St.  Asaph 
Diocesan  Conference,  will  not  have  surprised  those 
who  have  borne  in  mind  his  deep  and  unintermitted 
interest  in  the  fortunes  and  prospects  of  the  Church, 
and  his  habit  of  seeking  relief  from  the  pressure  of 
one  set  of  thoughts  and  anxieties  by  giving  full  play 
to  his  mental  energies  in  another  direction.  Its  com- 
position and  appearance  at  this  moment  are  quite 
accounted  for ;  it  is  a  contribution  to  the  business  of 
the  conference  of  his  own  diocese,  and  it  was  promised 
long  before  an  autumn  session  on  a  great  question 
between  the  two  Houses  was  in  view.  Still  the 
appearance  of  such  a  document  from  a  person  in 
Mr.  Gladstone's  position  must,  of  course,  invite  atten- 
tion and  speculation.  He  may  put  aside  the  questions 
which  the  word  "  Disestablishment " — which  was  in 
the  thesis  given  him  to  write  upon — is  likely  to  pro- 

^  Guardian,  29th  October  1884. 


G4  MB.  GLADSTONE'S  LETTER  V 

voice — "Will  it  come?  ought  it  to  come?  must  it 
come  ?  Is  it  near,  or  somewhat  distant,  or  indefinitely 
remote  ?  "  On  these  questions  he  has  not  a  word  to 
say.  But,  all  the  same,  people  will  naturally  try  to 
read  between  the  lines,  and  to  find  out  what  was  in 
the  writer's  thoughts  about  these  questions.  We 
cannot,  however,  see  that  there  is  anything  to  be 
gathered  from  the  Letter  as  to  the  political  aspect  of 
the  matter ;  he  simply  confines  himself  to  the  obvious 
lesson  which  passing  events  sufficiently  bring  with 
them,  that  whatever  may  come  it  is  our  business  to  be 
prepared. 

His  anxieties  are  characteristic.  The  paper  shows, 
we  think,  that  it  has  not  escaped  him  that  disestab- 
lishment, however  compensated  as  some  sanguine 
people  hope,  would  be  a  great  disaster  and  ruin.  It 
would  be  the  failure  and  waste  to  the  country  of  noble 
and  astonishing  efforts;  it  would  be  the  break-up 
and  collapse  of  a  great  and  cheap  system,  by  which 
light  and  human  kindliness  and  intelligence  are 
carried  to  vast  tracts,  that  without  its  presence  must 
soon  become  as  stagnant  and  hopeless  as  many  of 
the  rural  coimmines  of  France ;  the  blow  would  at  the 
moment  cripple  and  disorganise  the  Church  for  its 
work  even  in  the  towns.  But  though  "happily  im- 
probable," it  may  come ;  and  in  such  a  contingency, 
what  occupies  Mr.  Gladstone's  thoughts  is,  not  the 
question  whether  it  would  be  disastrous,  but  whether 
it  would  be  disgraceful.  That  is  the  point  which 
disturbs  and  distresses  him — the  possibility  that  the 


V  ON  THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH  65 

end  of  our  later  Church  history,  the  end  of  that 
wonderful  experiment  which  has  been  going  on  from 
the  sixteenth  century,  with  such  great  vicissitudes, 
but  after  every  shock  with  increasing  improvement 
and  hope,  should  at  last  be  not  only  failure,  but 
failure  with  dishonour ;  and  this,  he  says,  could  only 
come  in  one  of  two  ways.  It  might  come  from  the 
Church  having  sunk  into  sloth  and  death,  without 
faith,  without  conscience,  without  love.  This,  if  it 
ever  was  really  to  be  feared,  is  not  the  danger  before 
us  now.  Activity,  conviction,  energy,  self-devotion, 
these,  and  not  apathetic  lethargy,  mark  the  temper  of 
our  times  ;  and  they  are  as  conspicuous  in  the  Church 
as  anywhere  else.  But  these  qualities,  as  we  have  had 
ample  experience,  may  develop  into  fierce  and  angry 
conflicts.  It  is  our  internal  quarrels,  Mr.  Gladstone 
thinks,  that  create  the  most  serious  risk  of  disestablish- 
ment ;  and  it  is  only  our  quarrels,  which  we  have  not 
good  sense  and  charity  enough  to  moderate  and  keep 
within  bounds,  which  would  make  it  "  disgraceful." 

The  main  feature  of  the  Letter  is  the  historical 
retrospect  which  Mr.  Gladstone  gives  of  the  long 
history,  the  long  travail  of  the  later  English  Church. 
Hardly  in  its  first  start,  under  the  Tudors,  but  more 
and  more  as  time  went  on,  it  instinctively,  as  it  were, 
tried  the  great  and  difficult  problem  of  Christian 
liberty.  The  Churches  of  the  Continent,  Roman  and 
anti-Roman,  were  simple  in  their  systems;  only  one 
sharply  defined  theology,  only  the  disciples  and  repre- 
sentatives of  one  set  of  religious  tendencies,  would 

VOL.  II  F 


06  MR.  GLADSTONE'S  LETTER  V 

they  allow  to  dwell  within  their  borders ;  what  was 
refractory  and  refused  to  harmonise  was  at  once  cast 
out ;  and  for  a  certain  time  they  were  unvexed  with 
internal  dissensions.  This,  both  in  the  case  of  the 
Roman,  the  Lutheran,  and  the  Calvinistic  Churches 
of  the  Continent,  requires  to  be  somewhat  qualified ; 
still,  as  compared  with  the  rival  schools  of  the  English 
Church,  Puritan  and  Anglican,  the  contrast  is  a  true 
and  a  sharp  one.  Mr.  Gladstone  adopts  from  a 
German  writer  a  view  which  is  certainly  not  new  to 
many  in  England,  that  "the  Reformation,  as  a 
religious  movement,  took  its  shape  in  England,  not  in 
the  sixteenth  century  but  in  the  seventeenth."  "  It 
seems  plain,"  he  says,  "  that  the  great  bulk  of  those 
burned  under  Mary  were  Puritans " ;  and  he  adds, 
what  is  not  perhaps  so  capable  of  proof,  that  "under 
Elizabeth  we  have  to  look,  with  rare  exceptions, 
among  the  Puritans  and  Recusants  for  an  active  and 
religious  life."  It  was  not  till  the  Restoration,  it  was 
not  till  Puritanism  had  shown  all  its  intolerance,  all 
its  narrowness,  and  all  its  helplessness,  that  the 
Church  was  able  to  settle  the  real  basis  and  the  chief 
lines  of  its  reformed  constitution.  It  is  not,  as  Mr. 
Gladstone  says,  "a  heroic  history";  there  is  room 
enough  in  the  looseness  of  some  of  its  arrangements, 
and  the  incompleteness  of  others,  for  diversity  of 
opinion  and  for  polemical  criticism.  But  the  result, 
in  fact,  of  this  liberty  and  this  incompleteness  has 
been,  not  that  the  Church  has  declined  lower  and 
lower  into  indifference  and  negation,  but  that  it  has 


V  ON"  THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH  67 

steadily  mounted  in  successive  periods  to  a  higher 
level  of  purpose,  to  a  higher  standard  of  life  and 
thought,  of  faith  and  work.  Account  for  it  as  we 
may,  with  all  drawbacks,  with  great  intervals  of  seem- 
ing torpor,  with  much  to  be  regretted  and  to  be 
ashamed  of,  that  is  literally  the  history  of  the  English 
Church  since  the  Restoration  settlement.  It  is  not 
"  heroic,"  but  there  are  no  Church  annals  of  the  same 
time  more  so,  and  there  are  none  fuller  of  hope. 

But  every  system  has  its  natural  and  specific 
danger,  and  the  specific  English  danger,  as  it  is  the 
condition  of  vigorous  English  life,  is  that  spirit  of 
liberty  which  allows  and  attempts  to  combine  very 
divergent  tendencies  of  opinion.  "The  Church  of 
England,"  Mr.  Gladstone  thinks,  "  has  been  peculiarly 
liable,  on  the  one  side  and  on  the  other,  both  to 
attack  and  to  defection,  and  the  probable  cause  is  to 
be  found  in  the  degree  in  which,  whether  for  worldly 
or  for  religious  reasons,  it  was  attempted  in  her  case 
to  combine  divergent  elements  within  her  borders." 
She  is  still,  as  he  says,  "  working  out  her  system  by 
experience  " ;  and  the  exclusion  of  bitterness — even, 
as  he  says,  of  "savagery" — from  her  debates  and 
controversies  is  hardly  yet  accomplished.  There  is 
at  present,  indeed,  a  remarkable  lull,  a  "truce  of 
God,"  which,  it  may  be  hoped,  is  of  good  omen ;  but 
we  dare  not  be  too  sure  that  it  is  going  to  be  per- 
manent. In  the  meantime,  those  who  tremble  lest 
disestablishment  should  be  the  signal  of  a  great  break 
up  and  separation  of  her  different  parties  cannot  do 


68  MR.  GLADSTONE'S  LETTER  v 

better  than  meditate  on  Mr.  Gladstone's  very  solemn 
words : — 

The  great  maxim,  /;/  ovmibtis  caritas^  which  is  so 
necessary  to  temper  all  religious  controversy,  ought  to 
apply  with  a  tenfold  force  to  the  conduct  of  the  members 
of  the  Church  of  England.  In  respect  to  differences 
among  themselves  they  ought,  of  course,  in  the  first 
place  to  remember  that  their  right  to  differ  is  limited  by 
the  laws  of  the  system  to  which  they  belong  ;  but  within 
that  limit  should  they  not  also,  each  of  them,  recollect 
that  his  antagonist  has  something  to  say ;  that  the 
Reformation  and  the  counter- Reformation  tendencies 
were,  in  the  order  of  Providence,  placed  here  in  a  closer 
juxtaposition  than  anywhere  else  in  the  Christian  world  ; 
that  a  course  of  destiny  so  peculiar  appears  to  indicate 
on  the  part  of  the  Supreme  Orderer  a  peculiar  purpose, 
that  not  only  no  religious  but  no  considerate  or  prudent 
man  should  run  the  risk  of  interfering  with  such  a 
purpose  ;  that  the  great  charity  which  is  a  bounden  duty 
everywhere  in  these  matters  should  here  be  accompanied 
and  upheld  by  two  ever-striving  handmaidens,  a  great 
Reverence  and  a  great  Patience. 

This  is  true,  and  of  deep  moment  to  those  who 
guide  and  influence  thought  and  feeling  in  the  Church. 
But  further,  those  in  whose  hands  the  "Supreme 
Orderer  "  has  placed  the  springs  and  the  restraints  of 
political  movement  and  of  change,  if  they  recognise 
at  all  this  view  of  the  English  Church,  ought  to  feel 
one  duty  paramount  in  regard  to  it.  Never  was  the 
Church,  they  tell  us,  more  active  and  more  hopeful ; 


V  ON  THE  ENGLISH  CHURCH  69 

well  then,  what  politicians  who  care  for  her  have  to 
see  to  is  that  she  shall  have  time  to  work  out  effectu- 
ally the  tendencies  which  are  visible  in  her  now  more 
than  at  any  period  of  her  history — that  combination 
which  Mr.  Gladstone  wishes  for,  of  the  deepest 
individual  faith  and  energy,  with  forbearance  and 
conciliation  and  the  desire  for  peace.  She  has  a 
right  to  claim  from  English  rulers  that  she  should 
have  time  to  let  these  things  work  and  bear  fruit ;  if 
she  has  lost  time  before,  she  never  was  so  manifestly 
in  earnest  in  trying  to  make  up  for  it  as  now.  It  is 
not  talking,  but  working  together,  which  brings 
different  minds  and  tempers  to  understand  one 
another's  divergences ;  and  it  is  this  disposition  to 
work  together  which  shows  itself  and  is  growing  now. 
But  it  needs  time.  What  the  Church  has  a  right  to 
ask  from  the  arbiters  of  her  temporal  and  political 
position  in  the  country,  if  that  is  ultimately  and 
inevitably  to  be  changed,  is  that  nothing  precipitate, 
nothing  impatient,  should  be  done;  that  she  should 
have  time  adequately  to  develop  and  fulfil  what  she 
now  alone  among  Christian  communities  seems  in  a 
position  to  attempt. 


VI 

DISENDOWMENT^ 

This  generation  has  seen  no  such  momentous  change 
as  that  which  has  suddenly  appeared  to  be  at  our  very 
doors,  and  which  people  speak  of  as  disestablishment. 
The  word  was  only  invented  a  few  years  ago,  and  was 
sneered  at  as  a  barbarism,  worthy  of  the  unpractical 
folly  which  it  was  coined  to  express.  It  has  been 
bandied  about  a  good  deal  lately,  sometimes  de  coeur 
leger;  and  within  the  last  six  months  it  has  assumed  the 
substance  and  the  weight  of  a  formidable  probability. 
Other  changes,  more  or  less  serious,  are  awaiting  us 
in  the  approaching  future ;  but  they  are  encompassed 
with  many  uncertainties,  and  all  forecasts  of  their 
working  are  necessarily  very  doubtful.  About  this 
there  is  an  almost  brutal  clearness  and  simplicity,  as 
to  what  it  means,  as  to  what  is  intended  by  those  who 
have  pushed  it  into  prominence,  and  as  to  what  will 
follow  from  their  having  their  way. 

Disestablishment  has  really  come  to  mean,  in  the 

^  Guardian,  14th  October  1885. 


VI  DISENDOWMENT  71 

mouth  of  friends  and  foes,  simple  disendowment.  It 
is  well  that  the  question  should  be  set  in  its  true 
terms,  without  being  confused  with  vague  and  less 
important  issues.  It  is  not  very  easy  to  say  what  dis- 
establishment by  itself  would  involve,  except  the  dis- 
appearance of  Bishops  from  the  Upper  House,  or  the 
presence  of  other  religious  dignitaries,  with  equal  rank 
and  rights,  alongside  of  them.  Questions  of  patron- 
age and  ecclesiastical  law  might  be  difficult  to  settle ; 
but  otherwise  a  statute  of  mere  disestablishment,  not 
easy  indeed  to  formulate,  would  leave  the  Church  in 
the  eyes  of  the  country  very  much  what  it  found  it. 
Perhaps  "  My  lord  "  might  be  more  widely  dropped 
in  addressing  Bishops ;  but  otherwise,  the  aspect  of 
the  Church,  its  daily  work,  its  organisations,  would 
remain  the  same,  and  it  would  depend  on  the  Church 
itself  whether  the  consideration  paid  to  it  continues 
what  it  has  been ;  whether  it  shall  be  diminished  or 
increased.  The  privilege  of  being  publicly  recognised 
with  special  marks  of  honour  by  the  State  has  been 
dearly  paid  for  by  the  claim  which  the  State  has 
always,  and  sometimes  unscrupulously,  insisted  on,  of 
making  the  true  interests  of  the  Church  subservient  to 
its  own  passing  necessities. 

But  there  is  no  haziness  about  the  meaning  of 
disendowment.  Property  is  a  tangible  thing,  and  is 
subject  to  the  four  rules  of  arithmetic,  and  ultimately 
to  the  force  of  the  strong  arm.  When  you  talk  of  dis- 
endowment, you  talk  of  taking  from  the  Church,  not 
honour  or  privilege  or  influence,  but  visible  things, 


72  DISENDOWMENT  vi 

to  be  measured  and  counted  and  pointed  to,  which 
now  belong  to  it  and  which  you  want  to  belong  to 
some  one  else.  They  belong  to  individuals  because 
the  individuals  belong  to  a  great  body.  There  are,  of 
course,  many  people  who  do  not  believe  that  such  a 
body  exists ;  or  that  if  it  does,  it  has  been  called  into 
being  and  exists  simply  by  the  act  of  the  State,  like 
the  army,  and,  like  the  army,  liable  to  be  disbanded 
by  its  master.  But  that  is  a  view  resting  on  a  philo- 
sophical theory  of  a  purely  subjective  character ;  it  is 
as  little  the  historical  or  legal  view  as  it  is  the  theo- 
logical view.  We  have  not  yet  lost  our  right  in  the 
nineteenth  century  to  think  of  the  Church  of  England 
as  a  continuous,  historic,  religious  society,  bound  by 
ties  which,  however  strained,  are  still  unbroken  with 
that  vast  Christendom  from  which  as  a  matter  of  fact 
it  sprung,  and  still,  in  spite  of  all  differences,  external 
and  internal,  and  by  force  of  its  traditions  and  in- 
stitutions, as  truly  one  body  as  anything  can  be  on 
earth.  To  this  Church,  this  body,  by  right  which  at 
present  is  absolutely  unquestionable,  property  belongs ; 
property  has  been  given  from  time  immemorial  down 
to  yesterday.  This  property,  in  its  bulk,  with  what- 
ever abatements  and  allowances,  it  is  intended  to  take 
from  the  Church.  This  is  disendowment,  and  this  is 
what  is  before  us. 

It  is  well  to  realise  as  well  as  we  can  what  is 
inevitably  involved  in  this  vast  and,  in  modern  Eng- 
land, unexampled  change,  which  we  are  sometimes 
invited  to  view  with  philosophic  calmness  or  resigna- 


Yi  DISENDOWMENT  73 

tion,  as  the  unavoidable  drift  of  the  current  of  modern 
thought,  or  still  more  cheerfully  to  welcome,  as  the 
beginning  of  a  new  era  in  the  prosperity  and  strength 
of  the  Church  as  a  religious  institution.  We  are 
entreated  to  be  of  good  cheer.  The  Church  will  be 
more  free ;  it  will  no  longer  be  mixed  up  with  sordid 
money  matters  and  unpopular  payments  ;  it  will  no 
longer  have  the  discredit  of  State  control ;  the  rights 
of  the  laity  will  come  up  and  a  blow  will  be  struck 
at  clericalism.  With  all  our  machinery  shattered 
and  ruined  we  shall  be  thrown  more  on  individual 
energy  and  spontaneous  originality  of  effort.  Our  new 
poverty  will  spur  us  into  zeal.  Above  all,  the  Church 
will  be  delivered  from  the  temptation,  incident  to 
wealth,  of  sticking  to  abuses  for  the  sake  of  gold ;  of 
shrinking  from  principle  and  justice  and  enthusiasm, 
out  of  fear  of  worldly  loss.  It  will  no  longer'  be  a 
place  for  drones  and  hirelings.  It  is  very  kind  of  the 
revolutionists  to  wish  all  this  good  to  the  Church, 
though  if  the  Church  is  so  bad  as  to  need  all  these 
good  wishes  for  its  improvement,  it  would  be  more 
consistent,  and  perhaps  less  cynical,  to  wish  it  ruined 
altogether.  Yet  even  if  the  Church  were  likely  to 
thrive  better  on  no  bread,  there  are  reasons  of  public 
morality  why  it  should  not  be  robbed.  But  these 
prophecies  and  forecasts  really  belong  to  a  sphere  far 
removed  from  the  mental  activity  of  those  who  so 
easily  indulge  in  them.  These  excellent  persons  are 
hardly  fitted  by  habit  and  feeling  to  be  judges  of  the 
probable  course  of  Divine  Providence,  or  the  develop- 


74  DISENDOWMENT  vi 

ment  of  new  religious  energies  and  spiritual  tendencies 
in  a  suddenly  impoverished  body.  What  they  can 
foresee,  and  what  we  can  foresee  also  is,  that  these 
tabulae  novae  will  be  a  great  blow  to  the  Church. 
They  mean  that,  and  that  we  understand. 

It  is  idle  to  talk  as  if  it  was  to  be  no  blow  to  the 
Church.  The  confiscation  of  Wesleyan  and  Roman 
Catholic  Church  property  would  be  a  real  blow  to 
Wesleyan  or  Roman  Catholic  interests  ;  and  in  pro- 
portion as  the  body  is  greater  the  effects  of  the  blow 
must  be  heavier  and  more  signal.  It  is  trifling  with 
our  patience  to  pretend  to  persuade  us  that  such  a 
confiscation  scheme  as  is  now  recommended  to  the 
country  would  not  throw  the  whole  work  of  the 
Church  into  confusion  and  disaster,  not  perhaps 
irreparable,  but  certainly  for  the  time  overwhelming 
and  perilous.  People  speak  sometimes  as  if  such  a 
huge  transfer  of  property  was  to  be  done  with  the 
stroke  of  a  pen  and  the  aid  of  a  few  ofifice  clerks ; 
they  forget  what  are  the  incidents  of  an  institution 
which  has  lasted  in  England  for  more  than  a  thousand 
years,  and  whose  business  extends  to  every  aspect  and 
degree  of  our  very  complex  society  from  the  highest 
to  the  lowest.  Resources  may  be  replaced,  but  for 
the  time  they  must  be  crippled.  Life  may  be  re- 
arranged for  the  new  circumstances,  but  in  the  mean- 
while all  the  ordinary  assumptions  have  to  be  changed, 
all  the  ordinary  channels  of  activity  are  stopped  up  or 
diverted. 

And  why  should  this  vast  and  far-reaching  change 


VI  DISENDOWMENT  75 

be  made?  Is  it  unlawful  for  the  Church  to  hold 
property  ?  Other  religious  organisations  hold  it,  and 
even  the  Salvation  Army  knows  the  importance  of 
funds  for  its  work.  Is  it  State  property  which  the 
State  may  resume  for  other  uses?  If  anything  is 
certain  it  is  that  the  State,  except  in  an  inconsiderable 
degree,  did  not  endow  the  Church,  but  consented  in 
the  most  solemn  way  to  its  being  endowed  by  the 
gifts  of  private  donors,  as  it  now  consents  to  the 
endowment  in  this  way  of  other  religious  bodies. 
Does  the  bigness  of  the  property  entitle  the  State  to 
claim  it?  This  is  a  formidable  doctrine  for  other 
religious  bodies,  as  they  increase  in  influence  and 
numbers.  Is  it  vexatious  that  the  Church  should  be 
richer  and  more  powerful  than  the  sects  ?  It  is  not 
the  fault  of  the  Church  that  it  is  the  largest  and  the 
most  ancient  body  in  England.  There  is  but  one 
real  and  adequate  reason :  it  is  the  wish  to  disable 
and  paralyse  a  great  religious  corporation,  the  largest 
and  most  powerful  representative  of  Christianity  in 
our  English  society,  to  exhibit  it  to  the  nation  after 
centuries  of  existence  at  length  defeated  and  humbled 
by  the  new  masters'  power,  to  deprive  it  of  the 
organisation  and  the  resources  which  it  is  using  daily 
with  increasing  effect  for  impressing  religious  truth  on 
the  people,  for  winning  their  interest,  their  confidence, 
and  their  sympathy,  for  obtaining  a  hold  on  the 
generations  which  are  coming.  The  Liberation 
Society  might  go  on  for  years  repeating  their  dreary 
catalogue  of  grievances  and  misstatements.     Doubt- 


76  DISENDOWMENT  vi 

less  there  is  much  for  which  they  desire  to  punish  the 
Church ;  doubtless,  too,  there  are  men  among  them 
who  are  persuaded  that  they  would  serve  religion  by 
discrediting  and  impoverishing  the  Church.  But  they 
are  not  the  people  with  whom  the  Church  has  to 
reckon.  The  Liberationists  might  have  long  asked 
in  vain  for  their  pet  "  emancipation  "  scheme.  They 
are  stronger  men  than  the  Liberationists  who  are 
going  in  now  for  disendowment.  They  are  men — we 
do  them  no  wrong — who  sincerely  think  Christianity 
mischievous,  and  w^ho  see  in  the  power  and  resources 
of  the  Church  a  bulwark  and  representative  of  all 
religion  which  it  is  of  the  first  importance  to  get 
rid  of. 

This  is  the  one  adequate  and  consistent  reason  for 
the  confiscation  of  the  property  of  the  Church.  There 
is  no  other  reason  that  will  bear  discussion  to  be  given 
for  what,  without  it,  is  a  great  moral  and  political 
wrong.  In  such  a  settled  society  as  ours,  where  men 
reckon  on  what  is  their  own,  such  a  sweeping  and 
wholesale  transfer  of  property  cannot  be  justified,  on 
a  mere  balance  of  probable  expediency  in  the  use  of 
it.  Unless  it  is  as  a  punishment  for  gross  neglect  and 
abuse,  as  was  alleged  in  the  partial  confiscations  of 
the  sixteenth  century,  or  unless  it  is  called  for  as  a 
step  to  break  down  what  can  no  longer  be  tolerated, 
like  slavery,  there  is  no  other  nanie  for  it,  in  the 
estimate  of  justice,  than  that  of  a  deep  and  irreparable 
wrong,  'i'his  is  certainly  not  the  time  to  punish  the 
Church  when  it  never  was  more  improving  and  more 


VI  DISENDOWMENT  77 

unsparing  of  sacrifice  and  effort.  But  it  may  be  full 
time  to  stop  a  career  which  may  render  success  more 
difficult  for  schemes  ahead,  which  make  no  secret  of 
their  intention  to  dispense  with  religion.  This,  how- 
ever, is  not  what  most  Englishmen  wish,  whether 
Liberals  or  Conservatives,  or  even  Nonconformists.; 
and  without  this  end  there  is  no  more  justice  in 
disendowing  a  great  religious  corporation  like  the 
Church,  than  in  disendowing  the  Duke  of  Bedford  or 
the  Duke  of  Westminster.  Of  course  no  one  can 
deny  the  competence  of  Parliament  to  do  either  one 
or  the  other;  but  power  does  not  necessarily  carry 
with  it  justice,  and  justice  means  that  while  there  are 
great  and  small,  rich  and  poor,  the  State  should 
equally  protect  all  its  members  and  all  its  classes, 
however  different.  Revolutions  have  no  law ;  but  a 
great  wrong,  deliberately  inflicted  in  times  of  settled 
order,  is  more  mischievous  to  the  nation  than  even  to 
those  who  suffer  from  it.  History  has  shown  us  what 
follows  from  such  gratuitous  and  wanton  wrong  in  the 
bitter  feehng  of  defeat  and  humiliation  lasting  through 
generations.  But  worse  than  this  is  the  effect  on  the 
political  morality  of  the  nation ;  the  corrupting  and 
fatal  consciousness  of  having  once  broken  through  the 
restraints  of  recognised  justice,  of  having  acquiesced 
in  a  tempting  but  high-handed  wrong.  The  effects  of 
disendowment  concern  England  and  its  morality  even 
more  deeply  than  they  do  the  Church. 


VII 

THE  NEW  COURT  ^ 

The  claim  maintained  by  the  Archbishop  in  his 
Judgment,  by  virtue  of  his  metropoHtical  authority 
and  by  that  alone,  to  cite,  try,  and  sentence  one  of  his 
suffragans,  is  undoubtedly  what  is  called  in  slang 
language  "  a  large  order."  Even  by  those  who  may 
have  thought  it  inevitable,  after  the  Watson  case 
had  been  so  distinctly  accepted  by  the  books  as  a 
precedent,  it  is  yet  felt  as  a  surprise,  in  the  sense  in 
which  a  thing  is  often  a  surprise  when,  after  being  only 
talked  about  it  becomes  a  reality.  We  can  imagine 
some  people  getting  up  in  the  morning  on  last  Satur- 
day with  one  set  of  feelings,  and  going  to  bed  with 
another.  Bishops,  then,  who  in  spite  of  the  alleged 
anarchy,  are  still  looked  upon  with  great  reverence,  as 
almost  irresponsible  in  what  they  say  and  do  officially, 
are,  it  seems,  as  much  at  the  mercy  of  the  law  as  the 
presbyters  and  deacons  whom  they  have  occasionally 
sent  before  the  Courts.  They,  too,  at  the  will  of 
chance  accusers  who  are  accountable  to  no  one,  are 
^  Guardian,  i^ih  May  1889. 


VII  THE  NEW  COURT  79 

liable  to  the  humiliation,  worry,  and  crushing  law- 
bills  of  an  ecclesiastical  suit.  Whatever  may  be 
thought  of  this  now,  it  would  have  seemed  extravagant 
and  incredible  to  the  older  race  of  Bishops  that  their 
actions  should  be  so  called  in  question.  They  would 
have  thought  their  dignity  gravely  assailed,  if  besides 
having  to  incur  heavy  expense  in  prosecuting  offending 
clergymen,  they  had  also  to  incur  it  in  protecting 
themselves  from  the  charge  of  being  themselves 
offenders  against  Church  law. 

The  growth  of  law  is  always  a  mysterious  thing ; 
and  an  outsider  and  layman  is  disposed  to  ask  where 
this  great  jurisdiction  sprung  up  and  grew  into  shape 
and  power.  In  the  Archbishop's  elaborate  and  able 
Judgment  it  is  indeed  treated  as  something  which  had 
always  been  ;  but  he  was  more  successful  in  breaking 
down  the  force  of  alleged  authorities,  and  inferences 
from  them,  on  the  opposite  side,  than  he  was  in 
establishing  clearly  and  convincingly  his  own  con- 
tention. Considering  the  dignity  and  importance  of 
the  jurisdiction  claimed,  it  is  curious  that  so  little  is 
heard  about  it  till  the  beginning  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  It  is  curious  that  in  its  two  most  conspicuous 
instances  it  should  have  been  called  into  activity  by 
those  not  naturally  friendly  to  large  ecclesiastical 
claims — by  Low  Churchmen  of  the  Revolution  against 
an  offending  Jacobite,  and  by  a  Puritan  association 
against  a  High  Churchman.  There  is  no  such  clear 
and  strong  case  as  Bishop  Watson's  till  we  come  to 
Bishop  Watson.      In  his  argument  the  Archbishop 


80  THE  NEW  COURT  vii 

rested  his  claim  definitely  and  forcibly  on  the  precedent 
of  Bishop  Watson's  case,  and  one  or  two  cases  which 
more  or  less  followed  it.  That  possibly  is  sufficient 
for  his  purpose ;  but  it  may  still  be  asked — What  did 
the  Watson  case  itself  grow  out  of?  what  were  the 
precedents — not  merely  the  analogies  and  supposed 
legal  necessities,  but  the  precedents — on  which  this 
exercise  of  metropolitical  jurisdiction,  distinct  from  the 
legatine  power,  rested  ?  For  it  seems  as  if  a  formid- 
able prerogative,  not  much  heard  of  where  we  might 
expect  to  hear  of  it,  not  used  by  Cranmer  and  Laud, 
though  approved  by  Cranmer  in  the  Reforjnatio  Legiuti^ 
had  sprung  into  being  and  energy  in  the  hands  of  the 
mild  Archbishop  Tenison.  Watson's  case  may  be 
good  law  and  bind  the  Archbishop.  But  it  would 
have  been  more  satisfactory  if,  in  reviving  a  long- 
disused  power,  the  Archbishop  had  been  able  to  go 
behind  the  Watson  case,  and  to  show  more  certainly 
that  the  jurisdiction  which  he  claimed  and  proposed 
to  exercise  in  conformity  with  that  case  had,  like  the 
jurisdiction  of  other  great  courts  of  the  Church  and 
realm,  been  clearly  and  customarily  exercised  long 
before  that  case. 

The  appearance  of  this  great  tribunal  among  us,  a 
distinctly  spiritual  court  of  the  highest  dignity,  cannot 
fail  to  be  memorable.  It  is  too  early  to  forecast  what 
its  results  may  be.  There  may  be  before  it  an  active 
and  eventful  career,  or  it  may  fall  back  into  disuse 
and  quiescence.  It  has  jealous  and  suspicious  rivals 
in  the  civil  courts,  never  well  disposed  to  the  claim  of 


VII  THE  NEW  COURT  81 

ecclesiastical  power  or  purely  spiritual  authority ;  and 
though  its  jurisdiction  is  not  likely  to  be  strained  at 
present,  it  is  easy  to  conceive  occasions  in  the  future 
which  may  provoke  the  interference  of  the  civil  court. 
But  there  is  this  interest  about  the  present  pro- 
ceedings, that  they  illustrate  with  curious  closeness, 
amid  so  much  that  is  different,  the  way  in  which  great 
spiritual  prerogatives  grew  up  in  the  Church.  They 
may  have  ended  disastrously ;  but  at  their  first  begin- 
nings they  were  usually  inevitable,  innocent,  blameless. 
Time  after  time  the  necessity  arose  of  some  arbiter 
among  those  who  were  themselves  arbiters,  rulers, 
judges.  Time  after  time  this  necessity  forced  those 
in  the  first  rank  into  this  position,  as  being  the  only 
persons  who  could  be  allowed  to  take  it,  and  so 
Archbishops,  Metropolitans,  Primates  appeared,  to 
preside  at  assemblies,  to  be  the  mouthpiece  of  a 
general  sentiment,  to  decide  between  high  authorities, 
to  be  the  centre  of  appeals.  The  Papacy  itself  at  its 
first  beginning  had  no  other  origin.  It  interfered 
because  it  was  asked  to  interfere ;  it  judged  because 
there  was  no  one  else  to  judge.  And  so  necessities 
of  a  very  different  kind  have  forced  the  Archbishop 
of  Canterbury  of  our  day  into  a  position  which  is  new 
and  strange  to  our  experience,  and  which,  however 
constitutional  and  reasonable  it  may  be,  must  give 
every  one  who  is  at  all  affected  by  it  a  good  deal  to 
think  about. 


VOL.  II 


VIII 
MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES^ 


The  way  in  which  the  subject  of  Miracles  has  been 
treated,  and  the  place  which  they  have  had  in  our 
discussions,  will  remain  a  characteristic  feature  of 
both  the  religious  and  philosophical  tendencies  of 
thought  among  us.  Miracles,  if  they  are  real  things, 
are  the  most  awful  and  august  of  realities.  But,  from 
various  causes,  one  of  which,  perhaps,  is  the  very 
word  itself,  and  the  way  in  which  it  binds  into  one 
vague  and  technical  generality  a  number  of  most 
heterogeneous  instances,  miracles  have  lost  much  of 
their  power  to  interest  those  who  have  thought  most 
in  sympathy  with  their  generation.  They  have  been 
summarily  and  loosely  put  aside,  sometimes  avowedly, 
more  often  still  by  implication.  Even  by  those  who 
accepted  and  maintained  them,  they  have  often  been 

^  liii^ht  Lectures  on  Miracles :  the  Hampton  Lectures  for  1865. 
By  tlic  Rev.  J.  B.  Mozley,  B.D.  The  Times,  51)1  and  6th  June 
1866. 


VIII  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  83 

touched  uncertainly  and  formally,  as  if  people  thought 
that  they  were  doing  a  duty,  but  would  like  much 
better  to  talk  about  other  things  which  really  attracted 
and  filled  their  minds.  In  the  long  course  of  theo- 
logical war  for  the  last  two  centuries,  it  is  hardly  too 
much  to  say  that  miracles,  as  a  subject  for  discussion, 
have  been  degraded  and  worn  down  from  their 
original  significance ;  vulgarised  by  passing  through 
the  handling  of  not  the  highest  order  of  controversial- 
ists, who  battered  and  defaced  what  they  bandied 
about  in  argument,  which  was  often  ingenious  and 
acute,  and  often  mere  verbal  sophistry,  but  which,  in 
any  case,  seldom  rose  to  the  true  height  of  the  ques- 
tion. Used  either  as  instruments  of  proof  or  as  fair 
game  for  attack,  they  suffered  in  the  common  and 
popular  feeling  about  them.  Taken  in  a  lump,  and  with 
little  reahsing  of  all  that  they  were  and  implied,  they 
furnished  a  cheap  and  tempting  material  for  "short 
and  easy  methods  "  on  one  side,  and  on  the  other 
side,  as  it  is  obvious,  a  mark  for  just  as  easy  and 
tempting  objections.  They  became  trite.  People 
got  tired  of  hearing  of  them,  and  shy  of  urging  them, 
and  dwelt  in  preference  on  other  grounds  of  argu- 
ment. The  more  serious  feeling  and  the  more  pro- 
found and  original  thought  of  the  last  half  century  no 
longer  seemed  to  give  them  the  value  and  importance 
which  they  had ;  on  both  sides  a  disposition  was  to 
be  traced  to  turn  aside  from  them.  The  deeper 
religion  and  the  deeper  and  more  enterprising  science 
of  the  day  combined  to  lower  them  from  their  old 


84  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

evidential  place.  The  one  threw  the  moral  stress  on 
moral  grounds  of  belief,  and  seemed  inclined  to 
undervalue  external  proofs.  The  other  more  and 
more  yielded  to  its  repugnance  to  admit  the  interrup- 
tion of  natural  law,  and  became  more  and  more  dis- 
inclined even  to  discuss  the  supernatural ;  and, 
curiously  enough,  along  with  this  there  was  in  one 
remarkable  school  of  religious  philosophy  an  in- 
creased readiness  to  believe  in  miracles  as  such, 
without  apparently  caring  much  for  them  as  proofs. 
Of  late,  indeed,  things  have  taken  a  different  turn. 
The  critical  importance  of  miracles,  after  for  a  time 
having  fallen  out  of  prominence  behind  other  ques- 
tions, has  once  more  made  itself  felt.  Recent  con- 
troversy has  forced  them  again  on  men's  thoughts, 
and  has  made  us  see  that,  whether  they  are  accepted 
or  denied,  it  is  idle  to  ignore  them.  They  mean  too 
much  to  be  evaded.  Like  all  powerful  arguments 
they  cut  two  ways,  and  of  all  powerful  arguments 
they  are  the  most  clearly  two-edged.  However  we 
may  limit  their  range,  some  will  remain  which  we 
must  face ;  which,  according  to  what  is  settled  about 
them,  either  that  they  are  true  or  not  true,  will  entirely 
change  all  that  we  think  of  religion.  Writers  on  all 
sides  have  begun  to  be  sensible  that  a  decisive  point 
requires  their  attention,  and  that  its  having  suffered 
from  an  old-fashioned  way  of  handling  is  no  reason 
why  it  should  not  on  its  own  merits  engage  afresh  the 
interest  of  serious  men,  to  whom  it  is  certainly  of 
consequence. 


VIII  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  85 

The  renewed  attention  of  theological  writers  to 
the  subject  of  miracles  as  an  element  of  proof  has  led 
to  some  important  discussions  upon  it,  showing  in 
their  treatment  of  a  well-worn  inquiry  that  a  change 
in  the  way  of  conducting  it  had  become  necessary. 
Of  these  productions  w^e  may  place  Mr.  Mozley's 
Ba77ipto7i  Lechcres  for  last  year  among  the  most 
original  and  powerful.  They  are  an  example,  and  a 
very  fine  one,  of  a  mode  of  theological  writing  which 
is  characteristic  of  the  Church  of  England,  and  almost 
peculiar  to  it.  The  distinguishing  features  of  it  are 
a  combination  of  intense  seriousness  with  a  self- 
restrained,  severe  calmness,  and  of  very  vigorous  and 
wide-ranging  reasoning  on  the  realities  of  the  case 
with  the  least  amount  of  care  about  artificial  symmetry 
or  scholastic  completeness.  Admirers  of  the  Roman 
style  call  it  cold,  indefinite,  wanting  in  dogmatic 
coherence,  comprehensiveness,  and  grandeur.  Ad- 
mirers of  the  German  style  find  little  to  praise  in  a 
cautious  bit-by-bit  method,  content  with  the  tests 
which  have  most  affinity  with  common  sense,  incredu- 
lous of  exhaustive  theories,  leaving  a  large  margin  for 
the  unaccountable  or  the  unexplained.  But  it  has  its 
merits,  one  of  them  being  that,  dealing  very  solidly 
and  very  acutely  with  large  and  real  matters  of  ex- 
perience, the  interest  of  such  writings  endures  as  the 
starting-point  and  foundation  for  future  work.  Butler 
out  of  England  is  hardly  known,  certainly  he  is  not 
much  valued  either  as  a  divine  or  a  philosopher; 
but  in  England,  though  we  criticise  him  freely,  it  will 


86  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

be  a  long  time  before  he  is  out  of  date.  Mr.  Mozley's 
book  belongs  to  that  class  of  \Yritings  of  which  Butler 
may  be  taken  as  the  type.  It  is  strong,  genuine  argu- 
ment about  difficult  matters,  fairly  facing  what  is  diffi- 
cult, fairly  trying  to  grapple,  not  with  what  appears  the 
gist  and  strong  point  of  a  question,  but  with  what 
really  and  at  bottom  is  the  knot  of  it.  It  is  a  book  the 
reasoning  of  which  may  not  satisfy  every  one ;  but  it 
is  a  book  in  which  there  is  nothing  plausible,  nothing 
put  in  to  escape  the  trouble  of  thinking  out  what 
really  comes  across  the  writer's  path.  This  will  not 
recommend  it  to  readers  who  themselves  are  not  fond 
of  trouble  ;  a  book  of  hard  thinking  cannot  be  a  book 
of  easy  reading ;  nor  is  it  a  book  for  people  to  go  to 
who  only  want  available  arguments,  or  to  see  a  ques- 
tion apparently  settled  in  a  convenient  way.  But  we 
think  it  is  a  book  for  people  who  wish  to  see  a  great 
subject  handled  on  a  scale  which  befits  it  and  with  a 
perception  of  its  real  elements.  It  is  a  book  which 
will  have  attractions  for  those  who  like  to  see  a 
powerful  mind  applying  itself  without  shrinking  or 
holding  back,  without  trick  or  reserve  or  show  of  any 
kind,  as  a  wrestler  closes  body  to  body  with  his 
antagonist,  to  the  strength  of  an  adverse  and  power- 
ful argument.  A  stern  self-constraint  excludes  every- 
thing exclamatory,  all  glimpses  and  disclosures  of 
what  merely  affects  the  writer,  all  advantages  from  an 
appeal,  disguised  and  indirect  perhaps,  to  the  opinion 
of  his  own  side.  But  though  the  work  is  not  rhe- 
torical, it  is  not  the  less  eloquent ;  but  it  is  eloquence 


VIII  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTOX  LECTURES  87 

arising  from  a  keen  insight  at  once  into  what  is  real 
and  what  is  great,  and  from  a  singular  power  of 
luminous,  noble,  and  expressive  statement.  There  is 
no  excitement  about  its  close  subtle  trains  of  reason- 
ing ;  and  there  is  no  affectation, — and  therefore  no 
affectation  of  impartiality.  The  writer  has  his  con- 
clusions, and  he  does  not  pretend  to  hold  a  balance 
between  them  and  their  opposites.  But  in  the  pres- 
ence of  such  a  subject  he  never  loses  sight  of  its 
greatness,  its  difficulty,  its  eventfulness ;  and  these 
thoughts  make  him  throughout  his  undertaking  cir- 
cumspect, considerate,  and  calm. 

The  point  of  view  from  which  the  subject  of 
miracles  is  looked  at  in  these  Lectures  is  thus  stated  in 
the  preface.  It  is  plain  that  two  great  questions 
arise — first.  Are  miracles  possible  ?  next,  If  they  are, 
can  any  in  fact  be  proved  ?  These  two  branches  of 
the  inquiry  involve  different  classes  of  considerations. 
The  first  is  purely  philosophical,  and  stops  the  inquiry 
at  once  if  it  can  be  settled  in  the  negative.  The 
other  calls  in  also  the  aid  of  history  and  criticism. 
Both  questions  have  been  followed  out  of  late  with 
great  keenness  and  interest,  but  it  is  the  first  which 
at  present  assumes  an  importance  which  it  never  had 
before,  with  its  tremendous  negative  answer,  revolu- 
tionising not  only  the  past,  but  the  whole  future  of 
mankind;  and  it  is  to  the  first  that  Mr.  Mozlcy's 
work  is  mainly  addressed. 

The  difficulty  which  attaches  to  miracles  in  the  period 
of  thought   through  which  we  are   now  passing  is  one 


88  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

which  is  concerned  not  with  their  evidence,  but  with 
their  intrinsic  credibility.  There  has  arisen  in  a  certain 
class  of  minds  an  apparent  perception  of  the  impossi- 
bility of  suspensions  of  physical  law.  This  is  one 
peculiarity  of  the  time  ;  another  is  a  disposition  to  main- 
tain the  disbelief  of  miracles  upon  a  religious  basis,  and 
in  a  connection  with  a  declared  belief  in  the  Christian 
revelation. 

The  following  Lectures,  therefore,  are  addressed 
mainly  to  the  fundamental  question  of  the  credibility 
of  Miracles,  their  use  and  the  evidences  of  them  being 
only  touched  on  subordinately  and  collaterally.  It  was 
thought  that  such  an  aim,  though  in  itself  a  narrow  and 
confined  one,  was  most  adapted  to  the  particular  need  of 
the  day. 

As  Mr.  Mozley  says,  various  points  essential  to  the 
whole  argument,  such  as  testimony,  and  the  criterion 
between  true  and  false  miracles,  are  touched  upon ;  but 
what  is  characteristic  of  the  work  is  the  way  in  which 
it  deals  with  the  antecedent  objection  to  the  possi- 
bility and  credibility  of  miracles.  It  is  on  this  part  of 
the  subject  that  the  writer  strikes  out  a  line  for  him- 
self, and  puts  forth  his  strength.  His  argument  may 
be  described  generally  ''s  a  plea  for  reason  against 
imagination  and  the  broad  impressions  of  custom. 
Experience,  such  experience  as  we  have  of  the  world 
and  human  life,  has,  in  all  ages,  been  really  the  mould 
of  human  thought,  and  with  large  exceptions,  the 
main  unconscious  guide  and  controller  of  human 
belief;   and  in  our  own  times  it  has  been  formally 


VIII  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  89 

and  scientifically  recognised  as  such,  and  made  the 
exclusive  foundation  of  all  possible  philosophy.  A 
philosophy  of  mere  experience  is  not  tolerant  of 
miracles ;  its  doctrines  exclude  them ;  but,  what  is  of 
even  greater  force  than  its  doctrines,  the  subtle  and 
penetrating  atmosphere  of  feeling  and  intellectual 
habits  which  accompanies  it  is  essentially  uncongenial 
and  hostile  to  them.  It  is  against  the  undue  influ- 
ence of  such  results  of  experience — an  influence 
openly  acting  in  distinct  ideas  and  arguments,  but  of 
which  the  greater  portion  operates  blindly,  insensibly, 
and  out  of  sight — that  Mr.  Mozley  makes  a  stand  on 
behalf  of  reason,  to  which  it  belongs  in  the  last  resort 
to  judge  of  the  lessons  of  experience.  Reason,  as  it 
cannot  create  experience,  so  it  cannot  take  its  place 
and  be  its  substitute ;  but  what  reason  can  do  is  to 
say  within  what  limits  experience  is  paramount  as  a 
teacher;  and  reason  abdicates  its  functions  if  it 
declines  to  do  so,  for  it  was  given  us  to  work  upon 
and  turn  to  account  the  unmeaning  and  brute 
materials  which  experience  gives  us  in  the  rough. 
The  antecedent  objection  against  miracles  is,  he  says, 
one  of  experience,  but  not  one  of  reason.  And  ex- 
perience, flowing  over  its  boundaries  tyrannically  and 
effacing  its  limits,  is  as  dangerous  to  truth  and  know- 
ledge as  reason  once  was,  when  it  owned  no  check  in 
nature,  and  used  no  test  but  itself. 

Mr.  Mozley  begins  by  stating  clearly  the  necessity 
for  coming  to  a  decision  on  the  question  of  miracles. 
It  cannot  remain  one  of  the  open  questions,  at  least 


90  MOZLEY'S  CAMPTON  lectures  viit 

of  religion.  There  is,  as  has  been  said,  a  disposition 
to  pass  by  it,  and  to  construct  a  religion  without 
miracles.  The  thing  is  conceivable.  We  can  take 
what  are  as  a  matter  of  fact  the  moral  results  of 
Christianity,  and  of  that  singular  power  with  which  it 
has  presided  over  the  improvement  of  mankind,  and 
alloying  and  qualifying  them  with  other  elements,  not 
on  the  face  of  the  matter  its  products,  yet  in  many 
cases  indirectly  connected  with  its  working,  form 
something  which  we  may  acknowledge  as  a  rule  of 
life,  and  which  may  satisfy  our  inextinguishable 
longings  after  the  unseen  and  eternal.  It  is  true  that 
such  a  religion  presupposes  Christianity,  to  which  it 
owes  its  best  and  noblest  features,  and  that,  as  far  as 
we  can  see,  it  is  inconceivable  if  Christianity  had  not 
first  been.  Still,  we  may  say  that  alchemy  preceded 
chemistry,  and  was  not  the  more  true  for  being  the 
step  to  what  is  true.  But  w^hat  we  cannot  say  of 
such  a  religion  is  that  it  takes  the  place  of  Christi- 
anity, and  is  such  a  religion  as  Christianity  has  been 
and  claims  to  be.  There  must  ever  be  all  the  differ- 
ence in  the  world  between  a  religion  which  is  or 
professes  to  be  a  revelation,  and  one  which  cannot 
be  called  such.  For  a  revelation  is  a  direct  work  and 
message  of  God ;  but  that  which  is  the  result  of  a 
process  and  progress  of  finding  out  the  truth  by  the 
experience  of  ages,  or  ot  correcting  mistakes,  laying 
aside  superstitions  and  gradually  reducing  the  gross 
mass  of  belief  to  its  essential  truth,  is  simply  on  a  level 
with  all  other  human  knowledge,  and,  as  it  is  about 


VIII  mozley's  bampton  lectures  91 

the  unseen,  can  never  be  verified.  If  there  has  been 
no  revelation,  there  may  be  religious  hopes  and 
misgivings,  religious  ideas  or  dreams,  religious  antici- 
pations and  trust ;  but  the  truth  is,  there  cannot  be  a 
religion  in  the  world.  Much  less  can  there  be  any 
such  thing  as  Christianity.  It  is  only  when  we  look 
at  it  vaguely  in  outline,  without  having  before  our 
mind  what  it  is  in  fact  and  in  detail,  that  we  can 
allow  ourselves  to  think  so.  There  is  no  transmuting 
its  refractory  elements  into  something  which  is  not 
itself;  and  it  is  nothing  if  it  is  not  primarily  a  direct 
message  from  God.  Limit  as  we  may  the  manner  of 
this  communication,  still  there  remains  what  makes  it 
different  from  all  other  human  possessions  of  truth, 
that  it  was  a  direct  message.  And  that,  to  whatever 
extent,  involves  all  that  is  involved  in  the  idea  of 
miracles.  It  is,  as  Mr.  Mozley  says,  inconceivable 
without  miracles. 

If,  then,  a  person  of  evident  integrity  and  loftiness  of 
character  rose  into  notice  in  a  particular  country  and 
community  eighteen  centuries  ago,  who  made  these  com- 
munications about  himself — that  he  had  existed  before 
his  natural  birth,  from  all  eternity,  and  before  the  world 
was,  in  a  state  of  glory  with  God;  that  he  was  the  only- 
begotten  Son  of  God ;  that  the  world  itself  had  been 
made  by  him  ;  that  he  had,  however,  come  down  from 
heaven  and  assumed  the  form  and  nature  of  man  for  a 
particular  purpose — viz.  to  be  the  Lamb  of  God  that 
taketh  away  the  sins  of  the  world  ;  that  he  thus  stood  in 
a  mysterious  and  supernatural  relation  to  the  whole  of 
mankind  ;  that  through  him  alone  mankind  had  access 


92  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

to  God  ;  that  he  was  the  head  of  an  invisible  kingdom,  into 
which  he  should  gather  all  the  generations  of  righteous 
men  who  had  lived  in  the  world  ;  that  on  his  departure 
from  hence  he  should  return  to  heaven  to  prepare  man- 
sions there  for  them  ;  and,  lastly,  that  he  should  descend 
again  at  the  end  of  the  world  to  judge  the  whole  human 
race,  on  which  occasion  all  that  were  in  their  graves 
should  hear  his  voice  and  come  forth,  they  that  had  done 
good  unto  the  resurrection  of  life,  and  they  that  had 
done  evil  unto  the  resurrection  of  damnation, — if  this 
person  made  these  assertions  about  himself,  and  all  that 
was  done  was  to  make  the  assertions,  what  would  be 
the  inevitable  conclusion  of  sober  reason  respecting  that 
person  ?  The  necessary  conclusion  of  sober  reason 
respecting  that  person  would  be  that  he  was  disordered 
in  his  understanding.  What  other  decision  could  we 
come  to  when  a  man,  looking  like  one  of  ourselves,  and 
only  exemplifying  in  his  life  and  circumstances  the 
ordinary  course  of  nature,  said  this  about  himself,  but 
that  when  reason  had  lost  its  balance  a  dream  of  extra- 
ordinary and  unearthly  grandeur  might  be  the  result  ? 
By  no  rational  being  could  a  just  and  benevolent  life  be 
accepted  as  proof  of  such  astonishing  announcements. 
Miracles  are  the  necessary  complement  then  of  the  truth 
of  such  announcements,  which  without  them  are  pur- 
poseless and  abortive,  the  unfinished  fragments  of  a 
design  which  is  nothing  unless  it  is  the  whole.  They 
are  necessary  to  the  justification  of  such  announcements, 
which,  indeed,  unless  they  are  supernatural  truths,  are 
the  wildest  delusions.  The  matter  and  its  guarantee 
are  the  two  parts  of  a  revelation,  the  absence  of  cither 
of  which  neutralises  and  undoes  it. 


VIII  mozley's  bamptox  lectures  93 

A  revelation,  in  any  sense  in  which  it  is  more  than 
merely  a  result  of  the  natural  progress  of  the  human 
mind  and  the  gradual  clearing  up  of  mistakes,  cannot 
in  the  nature  of  things  be  without  miracles,  because  it 
is  not  merely  a  discovery  of  ideas  and  rules  of  life,  but 
of  facts  undiscoverable  without  it.  It  involves  co7i- 
stituent  miracles,  to  use  De  Quincey's  phrase,  as  part 
of  its  substance,  and  could  not  claim  a  hearing  with- 
out evidential  or  polemic  ones.  No  other  portion  or 
form  of  proof,  however  it  may  approve  itself  to  the 
ideas  of  particular  periods  or  minds,  can  really  make 
up  for  this.  The  alleged  sinlessness  of  the  Teacher, 
the  internal  evidence  from  adaptation  to  human 
nature,  the  historical  argument  of  the  development  of 
Christendom,  are,  as  Mr.  Mozley  points  out,  by 
themselves  inadequate,  without  that  further  guarantee 
which  is  contained  in  miracles,  to  prove  the  Divine 
origin  of  a  religion.  The  tendency  has  been  of  late 
to  fall  back  on  these  attractive  parts  of  the  argument, 
which  admit  of  such  varied  handling  and  expression, 
and  come  home  so  naturally  to  the  feelings  of  an 
age  so  busy  and  so  keen  in  pursuing  the  secrets  of 
human  character,  and  so  fascinated  with  its  unfolding 
wonders.  But  take  any  of  them,  the  argument  from 
results,  for  instance,  perhaps  the  most  powerful  of 
them  all.  "We  cannot,"  as  Mr.  Mozley  says,  "rest 
too  much  upon  it,  so  long  as  we  do  not  charge  it 
with  more  of  the  burden  of  proof  than  it  is  in  its  own 
nature  equal  to — viz.  the  whole.  But  that  it  can- 
not bear."     The  hard,  inevitable  question  remains  at 


94  ]\rOZLEY'S  BAMPTOX  LECTURES  viii 

the  end,  for  the  most  attenuated  belief  in  Christianity 
as  a  religion  from  God — what  is  the  ultimate  link 
which  connects  it  directly  with  God?  The  readiness 
with  which  we  throw  ourselves  on  more  congenial 
topics  of  proof  does  not  show  that,  even  to  our  own 
minds,  these  proofs  could  suffice  by  themselves, 
miracles  being  really  taken  away.  The  whole  power 
of  a  complex  argument  and  the  reasons  why  it  tells 
do  not  always  appear  on  its  face.  It  does  not  depend 
merely  on  what  it  states,  but  also  on  unexpressed, 
unanalysed,  perhaps  unrealised  grounds,  the  real 
force  of  which  would  at  once  start  forth  if  they  were 
taken  away.  We  are  told  of  the  obscure  rays  of  the 
spectrum,  rays  which  have  their  proof  and  their  effect, 
only  not  the  same  proof  and  effect  as  the  visible  ones 
which  they  accompany ;  and  the  background  and 
latent  suppositions  of  a  great  argument  are  as 
essential  to  it  as  its  more  prominent  and  elaborate 
constructions.  And  they  show  their  importance 
sometimes  in  a  remarkable  and  embarrassing  way, 
when,  after  a  long  debate,  their  presence  at  the  bottom 
of  everything,  unnoticed  and  perhaps  unallowed  for, 
is  at  length  disclosed  by  some  obvious  and  decisive 
question,  which  some  person  had  been  too  careless 
to  think  of,  and  another  too  shy  to  ask.  We  may  not 
care  to  obtrude  miracles ;  but  take  them  away,  and 
see  what  becomes  of  the  argument  for  Christianity. 

It  must  be  remembered  that  when  this  part  of  Chris- 
tian evidence  comes  so  forcibly  home  to  us,  and  creates 
that  inward  assurance  which  it  does,  it  does  this  in  con- 


VIII  MOZLEYS  BAMPTON  LECTURES  95 

nection  with  the  proof  of  miracles  in  the  background, 
which  though  it  may  not  for  the  time  be  brought  into 
actual  view,  is  still  known  to  be  there,  and  to  be  ready 
for  use  upon  being  wanted.  The  indirect  proof  from 
results  has  the  greater  force,  and  carries  with  it  the 
deeper  persuasion,  because  it  is  additional  and  auxiliary 
to  the  direct  proof  behind  it,  upon  which  it  leans  all  the 
time,  though  we  may  not  distinctly  notice  and  estimate 
this  advantage.  Were  the  evidence  of  moral  result  to  be 
taken  rigidly  alone  as  the  one  single  guarantee  for  a 
Divine  revelation,  it  would  then  be  seen  that  we  had 
calculated  its  single  strength  too  highly.  If  there  is  a 
species  of  evidence  which  is  directly  appropriate  to  the 
thing  believed,  we  cannot  suppose,  on  the  strength  of  the 
indirect  evidence  we  possess,  that  we^an  do  without  the 
direct.  But  miracles  are  the  direct  credentials  of  a 
revelation  ;  the  visible  supernatural  is  the  appropriate 
witness  to  the  invisible  supernatural — that  proof  which 
goes  straight  to  the  point,  and,  a  token  being  wanted  of 
a  Divine  communication,  is  that  token.  We  cannot, 
therefore,  dispense  with  this  evidence.  The  position  that 
the  revelation  proves  the  miracles,  and  not  the  miracles 
the  revelation,  admits  of  a  good  qualified  meaning ;  but, 
taken  literally,  it  is  a  double  offence  against  the  rule  that 
things  are  properly  proved  by  the  proper  proof  of  them  ; 
for  a  supernatural  fact  is  the  proper  proof  of  a  super- 
natural doctrine,  while  a  supernatural  doctrine,  on  the 
other  hand,  is  certainly  not  the  proper  proof  of  a  super- 
natural fact. 

So  that,  whatever  comes  of  the  inquiry,  miracles 
and  revelation  must  go  together.    There  is  no  separ- 


96  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  lectures  VIII 

ating  them.  Christianity  may  claim  in  them  the  one 
decisive  proof  that  could  be  given  of  its  Divine  origin 
and  the  truth  of  its  creed ;  but,  at  any  rate,  it  must 
ever  be  responsible  for  them. 

But  suppose  a  person  to  say,  and  to  say  with  truth, 
that  his  own  individual  faith  does  not  rest  upon  miracles, 
is  he,  therefore,  released  from  the  defence  of  miracles  ? 
Is  the  question  of  their  truth  or  falsehood  an  irrelevant 
one  to  him  ?  Is  his  faith  secure  if  they  are  disproved  ? 
By  no  means  ;  if  miracles  were,  although  only  at  the  com- 
mencement, necessary  to  Christianity,  and  were  actually 
wrought,  and  therefore  form  part  of  the  Gospel  record 
and  are  bound  up  with  the  Gospel  scheme  and  doctrines, 
this  part  of  the  structure  cannot  be  abandoned  without 
the  sacrifice  of  the  other  too.  To  shake  the  authority  of 
one-half  of  this  body  of  statement  is  to  shake  the  autho- 
rity of  the  whole.  Whether  or  not  the  individual  makes 
use  of  them  for  the  support  of  his  own  faith,  the  miracles 
are  there  ;  and  if  they  are  there  they  must  be  there  either 
as  true  miracles  or  as  false  ones.  If  he  does  not  avail 
himself  of  their  evidence,  his  belief  is  still  affected  by 
their  refutation.  Accepting,  as  he  does,  the  supernatural 
truths  of  Christianity  and  its  miracles  upon  the  same 
report  from  the  same  witnesses,  upon  the  authority  of 
the  same  documents,  he  cannot  help  having  at  any  rate 
this  negative  interest  in  them.  For  if  those  witnesses 
and  documents  deceive  us  with  regard  to  the  miracles, 
how  can  we  trust  them  with  regard  to  the  doctrines?  If 
they  are  wrong  upon  the  evidences  of  a  revelation,  how 
can  we  depend  upon  their  being  right  as  to  the  nature  of 
that  revelation  ?      If  their  account  of  visible  facts  is  to 


VIII  mozley's  bampton  lectures  97 

be  received  with  an  explanation,  is  not  their  account  of 
doctrines  liable  to  a  like  explanation  ?  Revelation,  then, 
even  if  it  does  not  need  the  truth  of  miracles  for  the 
benefit  of  their  proof,  still  requires  it  in  order  not  to  be 
crushed  under  the  weight  of  their  falsehood.  .  .  .  Thus 
miracles  and  the  supernatural  contents  of  Christianity 
must  stand  or  fall  together.  These  two  questions — the 
nature  of  the  revelation,  and  the  evide?ice  of  the  revela- 
tion— cannot  be  disjoined.  Christianity  as  a  dispensa- 
tion undiscoverable  by  human  reason,  and  Christianity 
as  a  dispensation  authenticated  by  miracles — these  two 
are  in  necessary  combination.  If  any  do  not  include  the 
supernatural  character  of  Christianity  in  their  definition 
of  it,  regarding  the  former  only  as  one  interpretation  of  it 
or  one  particular  traditional  form  of  it,  which  is  separable 
from  the  essence — for  Christianity  as  thus  defined  the 
support  of  miracles  is  not  wanted,  because  the  moral 
truths  are  their  own  evidence.  But  Christianity  cannot 
be  maintained  as  a  revelation  undiscoverable  by  human 
reason,  a  revelation  of  a  supernatural  scheme  for  man's 
salvation,  without  the  evidence  of  miracles. 

The  question  of  miracles,  then,  of  the  supernatural 
disclosed  in  the  world  of  nature,  is  the  vital  point  for 
everything  that  calls  itself  Christianity.  It  may  be 
forgotten  or  disguised ;  but  it  is  vain  to  keep  it  back 
and  put  it  out  of  sight.  It  must  be  answered ;  and 
if  we  settle  it  that  miracles  are  incredible,  it  is  idle  to 
waste  our  time  about  accommodations  with  Christ- 
ianity, or  reconstitutions  of  it.  Let  us  be  thankful  for 
what  it  has  done  for  the  world;  but  let  us  put  it 
away,  both  name  and  thing.     It  is  an  attempt  after 

VOL.  II  H 


98  MOZLEY'S  BAMrXON  LECTURES  viii 

what  is  in  the  nature  of  things  impossible  to  man — a 
revealed  religion,  authenticated  by  God.  The  shape 
which  this  negative  answer  takes  is,  as  Mr.  Mozley 
points  out,  much  more  definite  now  than  it  ever  was. 
Miracles  were  formerly  assailed  and  disbelieved  on 
mixed  and  often  confused  grounds ;  from  alleged 
defect  of  evidence,  from  their  strangeness,  or  because 
they  would  be  laughed  at.  Foes  and  defenders  looked 
at  them  from  the  outside  and  in  the  gross ;  and  per- 
haps some  of  those  who  defended  them  most  keenly 
had  a  very  imperfect  sense  of  what  they  really  were. 
The  difficulty  of  accepting  them  now  arises  not  mainly 
from  want  of  external  evidence,  but  from  having  more 
keenly  realised  what  it  is  to  believe  a  miracle.  As 
Mr.  Mozley  says — 

How  is  it  that  sometimes  when  the  same  facts  and 
truths  have  been  before  men  all  their  lives,  and  pro- 
duced but  one  impression,  a  moment  comes  when  they 
look  different  from  what  they  did  ?  Some  minds  may 
abandon,  while  others  retain,  their  fundamental  position 
with  respect  to  those  facts  and  truths,  but  to  both  they 
look  stranger ;  they  excite  a  certain  surprise  which  they 
did  not  once  do.  The  reasons  of  this  change  then  it  is 
not  always  easy  for  the  persons  themselves  to  trace,  but 
of  the  result  they  are  conscious  ;  and  in  some  this  result 
is  a  change  of  belief. 

An  inward  process  of  this  kind  has  been  going  on 
recently  in  many  minds  on  the  subject  of  miracles  ;  and 
in  some  with  the  latter  result.  When  it  came  to  the 
question — which  every  one  must  sooner  or  later  put  to 
himself  on   this  subject — Did  these  things  really   take 


VIII  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  99 

place  ?  Are  they  matters  of  fact  ? — they  have  appeared 
to  themselves  to  be  brought  to  a  standstill,  and  to  be 
obliged  to  own  an  inner  refusal  of  their  whole  reason  to 
admit  them  among  the  actual  events  of  the  past.  This 
strong  repugnance  seemed  to  be  the  witness  of  its  own 
truth,  to  be  accompanied  by  a  clear  and  vivid  light,  to 
be  a  law  to  the  understanding,  and  to  rule  without  appeal 
the  question  of  fact.  .  .  .  But  when  the  reality  of  the  past 
is  once  apprehended  and  embraced,  then  the  miraculous 
occurrences  in  it  are  realised  too ;  being  reahsed  they 
excite  surprise,  and  surprise,  when  it  comes  in,  takes 
two  directions — it  either  makes  belief  more  real,  or  it 
destroys  belief.  There  is  an  element  of  doubt  in  sur- 
prise ;  for  this  emotion  arises  because  an  event  is  strange, 
and  an  event  is  strange  because  it  goes  counter  to  and 
jars  with  presumption.  Shall  surprise,  then,  give  life  to 
belief  or  stimulus  to  doubt  1  The  road  of  belief  and 
unbelief  in  the  history  of  some  minds  thus  partly  lies 
over  common  ground ;  the  two  go  part  of  their  journey 
together ;  they  have  a  common  perception  in  the  insight 
into  the  real  astonishing  nature  of  the  facts  with  which 
they  deal.  The  majority  of  mankind,  perhaps,  owe  their 
belief  rather  to  the  outward  influence  of  custom  and 
education  than  to  any  strong  principle  of  faith  within  ; 
and  it  is  to  be  feared  that  many,  if  they  came  to  per- 
ceive how  wonderful  what  they  believed  was,  would  not 
find  their  belief  so  easy  and  so  matter-of-course  a  thing 
as  they  appear  to  find  it.  Custom  throws  a  film  over 
the  great  facts  of  religion,  and  interposes  a  veil  between 
the  mind  and  truth,  which,  by  preventing  wonder,  inter- 
cepts doubt  too,  and  at  the  same  time  excludes  from 
deep   belief  and   protects   from   disbelief.      But    deeper 


100  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

faith  and  disbelief  throw  -off  in  common  the  depend- 
ence on  mere  custom,  draw  aside  the  interposing  veil, 
place  themselves  face  to  face  with  the  contents  of 
the  past,  and  expose  themselves  alike  to  the  ordeal  of 
wonder. 

It  is  evident  that  the  effect  which  the  visible  order  of 
nature  has  upon  some  minds  is,  that  as  soon  as  they 
realise  what  a  miracle  is,  they  are  stopped  by  what 
appears  to  them  a  simple  sense  of  its  impossibility.  So 
long  as  they  only  believe  by  habit  and  education,  they 
accept  a  miracle  without  difficulty,  because  they  do  not 
realise  it  as  an  event  which  actually  took  place  in  the 
world  ;  the  alteration  of  the  face  of  the  world,  and  the 
whole  growth  of  intervening  history,  throw  the  miracles 
of  the  Gospel  into  a  remote  perspective  in  which  they 
are  rather  seen  as  a  picture  than  real  occurrences.  But 
as  soon  as  they  see  that,  if  these  miracles  are  true,  they 
once  really  happened,  what  they  feel  then  is  the  apparent 
sense  of  their  impossibility.  It  is  not  a  question  of  evi- 
dence with  them  :  when  they  realise,  e.g.^  that  our  Lord's 
resurrection,  if  true,  was  a  visible  fact  or  occurrence,  they 
have  the  seeming  certain  perception  that  it  is  an  impos- 
sible occurrence.  "  I  cannot,"  a  person  says  to  himself 
in  effect,  "tear  myself  from  the  type  of  experience  and 
join  myself  to  another.  I  cannot  quit  order  and  law  for 
what  is  eccentric.  There  is  a  repulsion  between  such 
facts  and  my  belief  as  strong  as  that  between  physical 
substances.  In  the  mere  effort  to  conceive  these  amazing 
scenes  as  real  ones,  I  fall  back  upon  myself  and  upon 
that  type  of  reality  which  the  order  of  nature  has  im- 
pressed upon  me." 

The  antagonism  to  the  idea  of  miracles  has  grown 


VIII  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  101 

stronger  and  more  definite  with  the  enlarged  and 
more  widely- spread  conception  of  invariable  natural 
law,  and  also,  as  Mr.  Mozley  points  out,  with  that 
increased  power  in  our  time  of  realising  the  past, 
which  is  not  the  peculiarity  of  individual  writers,  but 
is  "part  of  the  thought  of  the  time."  But  though 
it  has  been  quickened  and  sharpened  by  these  in- 
fluences, it  rests  ultimately  on  that  sense  which  all 
men  have  in  common  of  the  customary  and  regular 
in  their  experience  of  the  world.  The  world,  which 
we  all  know,  stands  alone,  cut  off  from  any  other ; 
and  a  miracle  is  an  intrusion,  "an  interpolation  of 
one  order  of  things  into  another,  confounding  two 
systems  which  are  perfectly  distinct."  The  broad, 
deep  resistance  to  it  which  is  awakened  in  the  mind 
when  we  look  abroad  on  the  face  of  nature  is 
expressed  in  Emerson's  phrase — "A  miracle  is  a 
monster.  It  is  not  one  with  the  blowing  clouds  or 
the  falling  rain."  Who  can  dispute  it?  Yet  the 
rejoinder  is  obvious,  and  has  often  been  given — 
that  neither  is  man.  Man,  who  looks  at  nature 
and  thinks  and  feels  about  its  unconscious  unfeeling 
order;  man,  with  his  temptations,  his  glory,  and  his 
shame,  his  heights  of  goodness,  and  depths  of  infamy, 
is  not  one  with  those  innocent  and  soulless  forces  so 
sternly  immutable — "  the  blowing  clouds  and  falling 
rain."  The  two  awful  phenomena  which  Kant  said 
struck  him  dumb— the  starry  heavens,  and  right  and 
wrong — are  vainly  to  be  reduced  to  the  same  order 
of  things.    Nothing  can  be  stranger  than  the  contrast 


102  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

between  the  rigid,  inevitable  sequences  of  nature, 
apparently  so  elastic  only  because  not  yet  perfectly 
comprehended,  and  the  consciousness  of  man  in  the 
midst  of  it.  Nothing  can  be  stranger  than  the 
juxtaposition  of  physical  law  and  man's  sense  of 
responsibility  and  choice.  Man  is  an  "insertion," 
an  "interpolation  in  the  physical  system";  he  is 
"insulated  as  an  anomaly  in  the  midst  of  matter 
and  material  law."    Mr,  Mozley's  words  are  striking: — 

The  first  appearance,  then,  of  man  in  nature  was  the 
appearance  of  a  new  being  in  nature  ;  and  this  fact  was 
relatively  to  the  then  order  of  things  miraculous  ;  no 
more  physical  account  can  be  given  of  it  than  could  be 
given  of  a  resurrection  to  life  now.  What  more  entirely 
new  and  eccentric  fact,  indeed,  can  be  imagined  than 
a  human  soul  first  rising  up  amidst  an  animal  and 
vegetable  world  ?  Mere  consciousness — was  not  that 
of  itself  a  new  world  within  the  old  one  ?  Mere  know- 
ledge—  that  nature  herself  became  known  to  a  being 
within  herself,  was  not  that  the  same  ?  Certainly  man 
was  not  all  at  once  the  skilled  interpreter  of  nature,  and 
yet  there  is  some  interpretation  of  nature  to  which  man 
as  such  is  equal  in  some  degree.  He  derives  an 
impression  from  the  sight  of  nature  which  an  animal 
does  not  derive  ;  for  though  the  material  spectacle  is 
imprinted  on  its  retina,  as  it  is  on  man's,  it  does  not 
see  what  man  sees.  The  sun  rose,  then,  and  the  sun 
descended,  the  stars  looked  down  upon  the  earth,  the 
mountains  climbed  to  heaven,  the  cliffs  stood  upon  the 
shore,  the  same  as  now,  countless  ages  before  a  single 
being   existed   who  saw  it.      The    counterpart   of  this 


VIII  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  103 

whole  scene  was  wanting  —  the  understanding  mind  ; 
that  mirror  in  which  the  whole  was  to  be  reflected  ; 
and  when  this  arose  it  was  a  new  birth  for  creation 
itself,  that  it  became  kiiowit^ — an  image  in  the  mind 
of  a  conscious  being.  But  even  consciousness  and 
knowledge  were  a  less  strange  and  miraculous  intro- 
duction into  the  world  than  conscience. 

Thus  wholly  mysterious  in  his  entrance  into  this 
scene,  man  is  now  an  insulation  in  it ;  he  came  in 
by  no  physical  law,  and  his  freewill  is  in  utter  contrast 
to  that  law.  What  can  be  more  incomprehensible,  more 
heterogeneous,  a  more  ghostly  resident  in  nature,  than 
the  sense  of  right  and  wrong  ?  What  is  it  ?  Whence 
is  it  ?  The  obligation  of  man  to  sacrifice  himself  for 
right  is  a  truth  which  springs  out  of  an  abyss,  the  mere 
attempt  to  look  down  into  which  confuses  the  reason. 
Such  is  the  juxtaposition  of  mysterious  and  physical 
contents  in  the  same  system.  Man  is  alone,  then,  in 
nature  :  he  alone  of  all  the  creatures  communes  with  a 
Being  out  of  nature  ;  and  he  divides  himself  from  all 
other  physical  life  by  prophesying,  in  the  face  of  universal 
visible  decay,  his  own  immortality. 

And  till  this  anomaly  has  been  removed — that  is, 
till  the  last  trace  of  what  is  moral  in  man  has 
disappeared  under  the  analysis  of  science,  and  what 
ought  to  be  is  resolved  into  a  mere  aspect  of  what  is, 
this  deep  exception  to  the  dominion  of  physical  law 
remains  as  prominent  and  undeniable  as  physical  law 
itself. 

It  is,  indeed,  avowed  by  those  who  reduce  man  in 
common  with  matter  to  law  and  abolish  his  insulation 


104  MOZLEY'S  BAMrXON  LECTURES  viii 

in  nature,  that  upon  the  admission  of  free-will,  the 
objection  to  the  miraculous  is  over,  and  that  it  is 
absurd  to  allow  exception  to  law  in  man,  and  reject 
it  in  nature. 

But  the  broad,  popular  sense  of  natural  order,  and 
the  instinctive  and  common  repugnance  to  a  palpable 
violation  of  it,  have  been  forged  and  refined  into 
the  philosophical  objection  to  miracles.  Two  great 
thinkers  of  past  generations,  two  of  the  keenest  and 
clearest  intellects  which  have  appeared  since  the 
Reformation,  laid  the  foundations  of  it  long  ago. 
Spinoza  urged  the  uselessness  of  miracles,  and  Hume 
their  incredibility,  with  a  guarded  subtlety  and  long- 
sighted refinement  of  statement  which  made  them  in 
advance  of  their  age  except  with  a  few.  But  their 
reflections  have  fallen  in  with  a  more  advanced  stage 
of  thought  and  a  taste  for  increased  precision  and 
exactness,  and  they  are  beginning  to  bear  their  fruit. 
The  great  and  telling  objection  to  miracles  is  getting 
to  be,  not  their  want  of  evidence,  but,  prior  to  all 
question  of  evidence,  the  supposed  impossibility  of 
fitting  them  in  with  a  scientific  view  of  nature. 
Reason,  looking  at  nature  and  experience,  is  said 
to  raise  an  antecedent  obstacle  to  them  which  no 
alleged  proof  of  fact  can  get  over.  They  cannot  be, 
because  they  are  so  unlike  to  everything  else  in  the 
world,  even  of  the  strangest  kind,  in  this  point — in 
avowedly  breaking  the  order  of  nature.  And  reason 
cannot  be  admitted  to  take  cognizance  of  their  claims 
and  to  consider  their  character,  their  purpose,  their 


VIII  mozley's  bampton  lectures  105 

results,  their  credentials,  because  the  mere  supposition 
of  them  violates  the  fundamental  conception  and 
condition  of  science,  absolute  and  invariable  law, 
as  well  as  that  common -sense  persuasion  which 
everybody  has,  whether  philosopher  or  not,  of  the 
uniformity  of  the  order  of  the  world. 


II 

To  make  room  for  reason  to  come  in  and  pro- 
nounce upon  miracles  on  their  own  merits — to  clear 
the  ground  for  the  consideration  of  their  actual 
claims  by  disposing  of  the  antecedent  objection  of 
impossibility,  is  Mr.  Mozley's  main  object. 

Whatever  difficulty  there  is  in  believing  in  miracles 
in  general  arises  from  the  circumstance  that  they  are  in 
contradiction  to  or  unlike  the  order  of  nature.  To 
estimate  the  force  of  this  difficulty,  then,  we  must  first 
understand  what  kind  of  belief  it  is  which  we  have  in  the 
order  of  nature  ;  for  the  weight  of  the  objection  to  the 
miraculous  must  depend  on  the  nature  of  the  belief  to 
which  the  miraculous  is  opposed. 

His  examination  of  the  alleged  impossibility  of 
miracles  may  be  described  as  a  very  subtle  turning 
the  tables  on  Hume  and  the  empirical  philosophy. 
For  when  it  is  said  that  it  is  contrary  to  reason  to 
believe  in  a  suspension  of  the  order  of  nature,  he 
asks  on  what  ground  do  we  believe  in  the  order  of 
nature;  and  Hume  himself  supplies  the  answer. 
There  is  nothing  of  which  we  have  a  firmer  persua- 


lOG  M0ZLE\'8  l>AMrTON   LKCTUUES  vnt 

sion.  It  is  the  basis  of  human  life  and  knowledge. 
We  assume  at  each  step,  witlunit  a  doubt,  that  the 
future  will  be  like  the  past.  But  why  ?  Hume  has 
carefully  examined  the  question,  and  can  lind  no 
answer,  except  the  fact  lliat  we  do  assume  it.  **  I 
apprehend,"  sav^s  Mr.  Mozley,  accepting  Hume's  view 
of  the  tiatuie  of  probability,  "  that  wluii  we  examine 
the  dilVerent  reasons  which  may  be  assigned  for  this 
connection,  />.  for  the  belief  that  the  future  will  be 
like  the  past,  they  all  come  at  last  to  be  mere 
statements  of  the  belief  itself,  and  not  reasons  to 
account  for  it." 

Let  us  imagine  the  oeeurrcuec  of  a  particular  physical 
phenomenon  for  the  first  time.  Upon  that  single  occur- 
rence wo  should  have  but  the  very  faintest  expectation 
of  another.  If  it  did  occur  again  once  or  twice,  so 
far  from  counting  on  another  recurrence,  a  cessation 
would  con\e  as  the  more  natural  event  to  us.  But  let  it 
occur  a  hundred  times,  and  wc  should  feel  no  hesitation 
in  inviting  persons  from  a  distance  to  see  it  :  and  if  it 
occurred  every  day  for  years,  its  recurrence  would  then 
be  a  certainty  to  us,  its  cessation  a  marvel.  But  what 
has  taken  place  in  the  interin\  to  produce  this  total 
change  in  our  belief.^  From  the  mere  repetition  do  we 
know  anything  more  about  its  cause  ?  No.  Thei\  what 
have  we  got  besides  the  past  repetition  itself.?  Nothing. 
Why.  then,  are  we  so  certain  of  its  future  repetition  } 
All  \>t?  can  say  is  that  the  known  casts  its  shadow 
before  :  \\ c  piojeet  into  unborn  time  the  existing  types^ 
and  the  secret  skill  of  nature  intercepts  the  darkness  of 
the  tutuit?  by  ever  suspending  before  our  eyes,  as  it  were 


vni  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  107 

in  a  mirror,  a  rcllcction  of  tlic  past.  \Vc  really  look  at 
a  l)lank  before  us,  Init  the  miiul,  full  of  the  scene  behind, 
sees  it  again  in  front.   .    .   . 

What  ground  of  reason,  then,  can  we  assign  for  our 
expectation  that  any  part  of  the  course  of  nature  will  the 
next  moment  be  like  what  it  has  been  up  to  this  moment, 
i.e.  for  our  belief  in  the  uniformity  of  nature  ?  None. 
No  demonstrative  reason  can  be  given,  for  the  contrary 
to  the  recurrence  of  a  fact  of  nature  is  no  contradiction. 
No  probable  reason  can  be  given,  for  all  probable 
reasoning  respecting  the  course  of  nature  is  founded 
upon  this  presumption  of  likeness,  and  therefore  cannot 
be  the  foundation  of  it.  No  reason  can  be  given  for 
this  belief  It  is  without  a  reason.  It  rests  upon  no 
rational  ground  and  can  be  traced  to  no  rational 
principle.  Everything  connected  with  human  life 
depends  upon  this  belief,  every  practical  plan  or 
purpose  that  we  form  implies  it,  every  provision  we 
make  for  the  future,  every  safeguard  and  caution  we 
employ  against  it,  all  calculation,  all  adjustment  of 
means  to  ends,  supposes  this  belief;  it  is  this  principle 
alone  which  renders  our  experience  of  the  slightest  use 
to  us,  and  without  it  there  would  be,  so  far  as  we  are 
concerned,  no  order  of  nature  and  no  laws  of  nature  ; 
and  yet  this  belief  has  no  more  producible  reason  for  it 
than  a  speculation  of  fancy.  A  natural  fact  has  been 
repeated  ;  it  will  be  repeated  : — I  am  conscious  of  utter 
darkness  when  I  try  to  see  why  one  of  these  follows  from 
the  other  :  I  not  only  see  no  reason,  but  I  perceive  that 
I  see  none,  though  I  can  no  more  help  the  expectation 
than  I  can  stop  the  circulation  of  my  blood.  There  is 
a  premiss,  and  there  is  a  conclusion,  but  there  is  a  total 


108  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

want  of  connection  between  the  two.  The  inference, 
then,  from  the  one  of  these  to  the  other  rests  upon  no 
ground  of  the  understanding ;  by  no  search  or  analysis, 
however  subtle  or  minute,  can  we  extract  from  any 
comer  of  the  human  mind  and  intelligence,  however 
remote,  the  very  faintest  reason  for  it. 

Hume,  who  had  urged  with  great  force  that 
miracles  were  contrary  to  that  probability  which  is 
created  by  experience,  had  also  said  that  this  prob- 
ability had  no  producible  ground  in  reason ;  that, 
universal,  unfailing,  indispensable  as  it  was  to  the 
course  of  human  life,  it  was  but  an  instinct  which 
defied  analysis,  a  process  of  thought  and  inference 
for  which  he  vainly  sought  the  rational  steps.  There 
is  no  absurdity,  though  the  greatest  impossibility,  in 
supposing  this  order  to  stop  to-morrow ;  and,  if  the 
world  ends  at  all,  its  end  will  be  in  an  increasing 
degree  improbable  up  to  the  very  last  moment. 
But,  if  this  whole  ground  of  belief  is  in  its  own  nature 
avowedly  instinctive  and  independent  of  reason,  what 
right  has  it  to  raise  up  a  bar  of  intellectual  necessity, 
and  to  shut  out  reason  from  entertaining  the  question 
of  miracles  ?  They  may  have  grounds  which  appeal 
to  reason ;  and  an  unintelligent  instinct  forbids 
reason  from  fairly  considering  what  they  arc.  Reason 
cannot  get  beyond  the  actual  fact  of  the  present 
state  of  things  for  beheving  in  the  order  of  nature ; 
it  professes  to  find  no  necessity  for  it;  the  inter- 
ruption of  that  order,  therefore,  whether  probable  or 
not,  is  not  against  reason.      Philosophy  itself,  says 


VIII  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  109 

Mr,  Mozley,  cuts  away  the  ground  on  which  it  had 
raised  its  preliminary  objection  to  miracles. 

And  now  the  belief  in  the  order  of  nature  being  thus, 
however  powerful  and  useful,  an  unintelligent  impulse  of 
which  we  can  give  no  rational  account,  in  what  way 
does  this  discovery  affect  the  question  of  miracles  ?  In 
this  way,  that  this  belief  not  having  itself  its  foundation 
in  reason,  the  ground  is  gone  upon  which  it  could  be 
mamtamed  that  miracles  as  opposed  to  the  order  of 
nature  were  opposed  to  reason.  There  being  no  pro- 
ducible reason  why  a  new  event  should  be  like  the 
hitherto  course  of  nature,  no  decision  of  reason  is  con- 
tradicted by  its  unlikeness.  A  miracle,  in  being  opposed 
to  our  experience,  is  not  only  not  opposed  to  necessary 
reasoning,  but  to  any  reasoning.  Do  I  see  by  a  certain 
perception  the  connection  between  these  two  —  It  has 
happened  so,  it  will  happen  so  ;  then  may  I  reject  a 
new  reported  fact  which  has  not  happened  so  as  an 
impossibility.  But  if  I  do  not  see  the  connection 
between  these  two  by  a  certain  perception,  or  by  any 
perception,  I  cannot.  For  a  miracle  to  be  rejected  as 
such,  there  must,  at  any  rate,  be  some  proposition  in 
the  mind  of  man  which  is  opposed  to  it ;  and  that  pro- 
position can  only  spring  from  the  quarter  to  which  we 
have  been  referring  —  that  of  elementary  experimental 
reasoning.  But  if  this  experimental  reasoning  is  of  that 
nature  which  philosophy  describes  it  as  being  of,  i.e.  if 
it  is  not  itself  a  process  of  reason,  how  can  there  from 
an  irrational  process  of  the  mind  arise  a  proposition  at 
all, —  to  make  which  is  the  function  of  the  rational 
faculty  alone  ?     There  cannot ;   and   it   is  evident   that 


110  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

the  miraculous  does  not  stand  in  any  opposition  what- 
ever to  reason.   .   .   . 

Thus  step  by  step  has  philosophy  loosened  the  con- 
nection of  the  order  of  nature  with  the  ground  of  reason, 
befriending,  in  exact  proportion  as  it  has  done  this,  the 
principle  of  miracles.  In  the  argument  against  miracles 
the  first  objection  is  that  they  are  against  law;  and  this  is 
answered  by  saying  that  we  know  nothing  in  nature  of  law 
in  the  sense  in  which  it  prevents  miracles.  Law  can  only 
prevent  miracles  by  compelling  and  making  necessary 
the  succession  of  nature,  i.e.  in  the  sense  of  causation  ; 
but  science  has  itself  proclaimed  the  truth  that  we  see 
no  causes  in  nature,  that  the  whole  chain  of  physical 
succession  is  to  the  eye  of  reason  a  rope  of  sand,  con- 
sisting of  antecedents  and  consequents,  but  without  a 
rational  link  or  trace  of  necessary  connection  between 
them.  We  only  know  of  law  in  nature  in  the  sense  of 
recurrences  in  nature,  classes  of  facts,  like  facts  in  nature 
— a  chain  of  which,  the  junction  not  being  reducible  to 
reason,  the  interruption  is  not  against  reason.  The 
claim  of  law  settled,  the  next  objection  in  the  argument 
against  miracles  is  that  they  are  against  experience j 
because  we  expect  facts  like  to  those  of  our  experience, 
and  miracles  are  unlike  ones.  The  weight,  then,  of  the 
objection  of  unlikcncss  to  experience  depends  on  the 
reason  which  can  be  produced  for  the  expectation  of 
likeness  ;  and  to  this  call  philosophy  has  replied  by  the 
summary  confession  that  we  have  7W  reason.  Philo- 
sophy, then,  could  not  have  overthrown  more  thoroughly 
than  it  has  done  the  order  of  nature  as  a  necessary 
course  of  things,  or  cleared  the  ground  more  effectually 
for  the  principle  of  miracles, 


viir  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTOX  LECTURES  111 

Nor,  he  argues,  does  this  instinct  change  its 
nature,  or  become  a  necessary  law  of  reason,  when 
it  takes  the  form  of  an  inference  from  induction. 
For  the  last  step  of  the  inductive  process,  the  crea- 
tion of  its  supposed  universal,  is,  when  compared 
with  the  real  standard  of  universality  acknowledged 
by  reason,  an  incomplete  and  more  or  less  precarious 
process ;  "  it  gets  out  of  facts  something  more  than 
what  they  actually  contain " ;  and  it  can  give  no 
reason  for  itself  but  what  the  common  faith  derived 
from  experience  can  give,  the  anticipation  of  uniform 
recurrence.  "The  inductive  principle,"  he  says,  "is 
only  the  unreasoning  impulse  applied  to  a  scientific- 
ally ascertained  fact,  instead .  of  to  a  vulgarly  ascer- 
tained fact.  .  .  .  Science  has  led  up  to  the  fact,  but 
there  it  stops,  and  for  converting  the  fact  into  a  law 
a  totally  unscientific  principle  comes  in,  the  same  as 
that  which  generalises  the  commonest  observations 
in  nature." 

The  scientific  part  of  induction  being  only  the  pursuit 
of  a  particular  fact,  miracles  cannot  in  the  nature  of  the 
case  receive  any  blow  from  the  scientific  part  of  induc- 
tion ;  because  the  existence  of  one  fact  does  not  interfere 
with  the  existence  of  another  dissimilar  fact.  That 
which  does  resist  the  miraculous  is  the  //;;zscientific  part 
of  induction,  or  the  instinctive  generalisation  upon  this 
fact.  ...  It  does  not  belong  to  this  principle  to  lay 
down  speculative  positions,  and  to  say  what  can  or 
cannot  take  place  in  the  world.  It  does  not  belong  to 
it  to  control  religious  belief,  or  to  determine  that  certain 


112  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

acts  of  God  for  the  revelation  of  His  will  to  man,  re- 
ported to  have  taken  place,  have  not  taken  place.  Such 
decisions  are  totally  out  of  its  sphere  ;  it  can  assert  the 
universal  as  a  laiv^  but  the  universal  as  a  law  and  the 
universal  as  a  proposition  are  wholly  distinct.  The  one 
asserts  the  universal  as  a  fact,  the  other  as  a  presump- 
tion ;  the  one  as  an  absolute  certainty,  the  other  as  a 
practical  certainty,  when  there  is  no  reason  to  expect 
the  contrary.  The  one  contains  and  includes  the  par- 
ticular, the  other  does  not ;  from  the  one  we  argue 
mathematically  to  the  falsehood  of  any  opposite  par- 
ticular ;  from  the  other  we  do  not.  .  .  .  For  example, 
one  signal  miracle,  pre-eminent  for  its  grandeur,  crowned 
the  evidence  of  the  supernatural  character  and  office  of 
our  Lord — our  Lord's  ascension — His  going  up  with 
His  body  of  flesh  and  bones  into  the  sky  in  the  presence 
of  His  disciples.  "  He  lifted  up  His  hands,  and  blessed 
them.  And  while  He  blessed  them.  He  was  parted 
from  them,  and  carried  up  into  heaven.  And  they 
looked  stedfastly  toward  heaven  as  He  went  up,  and  a 
cloud  received  Him  out  of  their  sight." 

Here  is  an  amazing  scene,  which  strikes  even  the 
devout  believer,  coming  across  it  in  the  sacred  page 
suddenly  or  by  chance,  amid  the  routine  of  life,  with  a 
fresh  surprise.  Did,  then,  this  event  really  take  place  ? 
Or  is  the  evidence  of  it  forestalled  by  the  inductive  prin- 
ciple compelling  us  to  remove  the  scene  as  suck  out  of 
the  category  of  matters  of  fact  ?  The  answer  is,  that 
the  inductive  principle  is  in  its  own  nature  only  an 
expectation  J-  and  that  the  expectation,  that  what  is 
unlike  our  experience  will  not  happen,  is  quite  consistent 
with   its   occurrence   in  fact.      This   principle  does   not 


VIII  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  113 

pretend  to  decide  the  question  of  fact,  which  is  wholly 
out  of  its  province  and  beyond  its  function.  It  can  only 
decide  the  fact  by  the  medium  of  a  universal ;  the  uni- 
versal proposition  that  no  man  has  ascended  to  heaven. 
But  this  is  a  statement  which  exceeds  its  powder  ;  it  is 
as  radically  incompetent  to  pronounce  it  as  the  taste  or 
smell  is  to  decide  on  matters  of  sight ;  its  function  is 
practical,  not  logical.  No  antecedent  statement,  then, 
which  touches  my  belief  in  this  scene,  is  allowed  by  the 
laws  of  thought.  Converted  indeed  into  a  universal 
proposition,  the  inductive  principle  is  omnipotent,  and 
totally  annihilates  every  particular  which  does  not  come 
within  its  range.  The  universal  statement  that  no  man 
has  ascended  into  heaven  absolutely  falsifies  the  fact 
that  One  Man  has.  But,  thus  transmuted,  the  inductive 
principle  issues  out  of  this  metamorphose,  a  fiction  not 
a  truth  ;  a  weapon  of  air,  which  even  in  the  hands  of  a 
giant  can  inflict  no  blow  because  it  is  itself  a  shadow. 
The  object  of  assault  receives  the  unsubstantial  thrust 
without  a  shock,  only  exposing  the  want  of  solidity 
in  the  implement  of  war.  The  battle  against  the  super- 
natural has  been  going  on  long,  and  strong  men  have 
conducted  it,  and  are  conducting  it — but  what  they  want 
is  a  weapon.  The  logic  of  unbelief  wants  a  universal. 
But  no  real  universal  is  forthcoming,  and  it  only  wastes 
its  strength  in  wielding  a  fictitious  one. 

It  is  not  in  reason,  which  refuses  to  pronounce 
upon  the  possible  merely  from  experience  of  the 
actual,  that  the  antecedent  objection  to  miracles  is 
rooted.  Yet  that  the  objection  is  a  powerful  one 
the  consciousness  of  every  reflecting  mind  testifies. 

VOL.  II  I 


114  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

What,  then,  is  the  secret  of  its  force?  In  a  lecture 
of  singular  power  Mr.  Mozley  gives  his  answer. 
What  tells  beforehand  against  miracles  is  not  reason, 
but  imagination.  Imagination  is  often  thought  to 
favour  especially  the  supernatural  and  miraculous. 
It  does  do  so,  no  doubt.  But  the  truth  is,  that 
imagination  tells  both  ways — as  much  against  the 
miraculous  as  for  it.  The  imagination,  that  faculty 
by  which  we  give  life  and  body  and  reality  to  our 
intellectual  conceptions,  takes  its  character  from  the 
intellectual  conceptions  with  which  it  is  habitually 
associated.  It  accepts  the  miraculous  or  shrinks 
from  it  and  throws  it  off,  according  to  the  leaning  of 
the  mind  of  which  it  is  the  more  vivid  and,  so  to 
speak,  passionate  expression.  And  as  it  may  easily 
exaggerate  on  one  side,  so  it  may  just  as  easily  do 
the  same  on  the  other.  Every  one  is  familiar  with 
that  imaginative  exaggeration  which  fills  the  world 
with  miracles.  But  there  is  another  form  of  im- 
agination, not  so  distinctly  recognised,  which  is 
oppressed  by  the  presence  of  unchanging  succes- 
sion and  visible  uniformity,  which  cannot  shake 
off  the  yoke  of  custom  or  allow  anything  differ- 
ent to  seem  to  it  real.  The  sensitiveness  and 
impressibility  of  the  imagination  are  affected,  and 
unhealthily  affected,  not  merely  by  strangeness,  but 
by  sameness ;  to  one  as  to  the  other  it  may  "  passively 
submit  and  surrender  itself,  give  way  to  the  mere 
form  of  attraction,  and,  instead  of  grasping  something 
else,  be  itself  grasped  and  mastered  by  some  domi- 


VIII  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  115 

nant  idea."  And  it  is  then,  in  one  case  as  much  as 
in  the  other,  "  not  a  power,  but  a  failing  and  weak- 
ness of  nature." 

The  passive  imagination,  then,  in  the  present  case 
exaggerates  a  practical  expectation  of  the  uniformity  of 
nature,  implanted  in  us  for  practical  ends,  into  a  scientific 
or  universal  proposition  ;  and  it  does  this  by  surrender- 
ing itself  to  the  impression  produced  by  the  constant 
spectacle  of  fhe  regularity  of  visible  nature.  By  such  a 
course  a  person  allows  the  weight  and  pressure  of  this 
idea  to  grow  upon  him  till  it  reaches  the  point  of  actually 
restricting  his  sense  of  possibihty  to  the  mould  of  physical 
order.  .  .  .  The  order  of  nature  thus  stamps  upon  some 
minds  the  idea  of  its  immutability  simply  by  its  repetition. 
The  imagination  we  usually  indeed  associate  with  the 
acceptance  of  the  supernatural  rather  than  with  the 
denial  of  it ;  but  the  passive  imagination  is  in  truth 
neutral ;  it  only  increases  the  force  and  tightens  the  hold 
of  any  impression  upon  us,  to  whatever  class  the  im- 
pression may  belong,  and  surrenders  itself  to  a  super- 
stitious or  a  physical  idea,  as  it  may  be.  Materialism 
itself  is  the  result  of  imagination,  which  is  so  impressed 
by  matter  that  it  cannot  realise  the  existence  of  spirit. 

The  great  opponent,  then,  of  miracles,  considered 
as  possible  occurrences,  is  not  reason,  but  something 
which  on  other  great  subjects  is  continually  found  on 
the  opposite  side  to  reason,  resisting  and  counter- 
acting it ;  that  powerful  overbearing  sense  of  the 
actual  and  the  real,  which  when  it  is  opposed  by 
reason  is  apt  to  make  reason  seem  Hke  the  creator  of 
mere  ideal  theories ;  which  gives  to  arguments  im- 


116  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  lectures  VIII 

plying  a  different  condition  of  things  from  one  which 
is  familiar  to  present  experience  the  disadvantage  of 
appearing  like  artificial  and  unsubstantial  refinements 
of  thought,  such  as,  to  the  uncultivated  mind,  appear 
not  merely  metaphysical   discussions,   but  what  are 
known  to  be  the  most  certain  reasonings  of  physical 
and  mathematical  science.     It  is  that  measure  of  the 
probable,  impressed   upon   us  by  the   spectacle,  to 
which  we  are  accustomed  all  our  lives  long,  of  things 
as  we  find  them,  and  which  repels  the  possibility  of  a 
break  or  variation ;  that  sense  of  probability  which 
the  keenest  of  philosophers  declares  to  be  incapable 
of  rational  analysis,   and  pronounces  allied  to  irra- 
tional portions  of  our  constitution,  like  custom,  and 
the   effect   of  time,  and  which   is  just  as  much  an 
enemy  to  invention,  to  improvement,  to  a  different 
state  of  things  in  the  future,  as  it  is  to  the  belief  and 
realising  of  a  different  state  of  things  in  the  past. 
The  antecedent  objection  to  the  miraculous  is  not 
reason,  but  an  argument  which  limits  and   narrows 
the  domain  of  reason ;  which  excludes  dry,  abstract, 
passionless  reason — with  its  appeals  to  considerations 
remote  from  common  experience,  its   demands   for 
severe  reflection,  its  balancing  and  long  chains   of 
thought — from  pronouncing  on  what  seems  to  belong 
to  the  flesh  and  blood  realities  of  life  as  we  know  it. 
Against  this  tyrannical  influence,  which  may  be  in  a 
vulgar  and  popular  as  in  a  scientific  form,  which  may 
be  the  dull  result  of  habit  or  the  more  specious  effect 
of  a  sensitive  and  receptive  imagination,  but  which  in 


VIII  mozley's  bampton  lectures  117 

all  cases  is  at  bottom  the  same,  Mr.  Mozley  claims 
to  appeal  to  reason  : — 

To  conclude,  then,  let  us  suppose  an  intelligent  Chris- 
tian of  the  present  day  asked,  not  what  evidence  he  has 
of  miracles,  but  how  he  can  antecedently  to  all  evidence 
think  such  amazing  occurrences  possible^  he  would  reply, 
"  You  refer  me  to  a  certain  sense  of  impossibility  which 
you  suppose  me  to  possess,  applying  not  to  mathematics 
but  to  facts.  Now,  on  this  head,  I  am  conscious  of  a 
certain  natural  resistance  in  my  mind  to  events  unlike 
the  order  of  nature.  But  I  resist  many  things  which  I 
know  to  be  certain  :  infinity  of  space,  infinity  of  time, 
eternity  past,  eternity  future,  the  very  idea  of  a  God  and 
another  world.  If  I  take  mere  resistance,  therefore,  for 
denial,  I  am  confined  in  every  quarter  of  my  mind  ;  I 
cannot  carry  out  the  very  laws  of  reason,  I  am  placed 
under  conditions  which  are  obviously  false.  I  conclude, 
therefore,  that  I  may  resist  and  believe  at  the  same 
time.  If  Providence  has  implanted  in  me  a  certain  ex- 
pectation of  uniformity  or  likeness  in  nature,  there  is 
implied  in  that  very  expectation?  resistance  to  an  ?/;dike 
event,  which  resistance  does  not  cease  even  when  upon 
evidence  I  believe  the  event,  but  goes  on  as  a  mechanical 
impression,  though  the  reason  counterbalances  it.  Re- 
sistance, therefore,  is  not  disbelief,  unless  by  an  act  of 
my  own  reason  I  give  it  an  absolute  veto,  which  I  do 
not  do.  My  reason  is  clear  upon  the  point,  that  there  is 
no  disagreement  between  itself  and  a  miracle  as  such." 
.  .  .  Nor  is  it  dealing  artificially  with  ourselves  to  exert 
a  force  upon  our  minds  against  the  false  certainty  of  the 
resisting  imagination — such  a  force  as  is  necessary  to 
enable  reason  to  stand  its  ground,  and  bend  back  again 


118  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

that  spring  of  impression  against  the  miraculous  which 
has  illegally  tightened  itself  into  a  law  to  the  under- 
standing. Reason  does  not  always  prevail  spontane- 
ously and  without  effort  even  in  questions  of  belief;  so 
far  from  it,  that  the  question  of  faith  against  reason  may 
often  be  more  properly  termed  the  question  of  reason 
against  imagination.  It  does  not  seldom  require  faith 
to  believe  reason,  isolated  as  she  may  be  amid  vast  irra- 
tional influences,  the  weight  of  custom,  the  power  of 
association,  the  strength  of  passion,  the  vis  inertiae  of 
sense,  the  mere  force  of  the  uniformity  of  nature  as  a 
spectacle — those  influences  which  make  up  that  power 
of  the  world  which  Scripture  always  speaks  of  as  the 
antagonist  of  faith. 

The  antecedent  questions  about  miracles,  before 
coming  to  the  question  of  the  actual  evidence  of  any, 
are  questions  about  which  reason — reason  disengaged 
and  disembarrassed  from  the  arbitrary  veto  of  experi- 
ence— has  a  right  to  give  its  verdict.  Miracles  pre- 
suppose the  existence  of  God,  and  it  is  from  reason 
alone  that  we  get  the  idea  of  God ;  and  the  ante- 
cedent question  then  is,  whether  they  are  really  com- 
patible with  the  idea  of  God  which  reason  gives  us. 
Mr.  Mozley  remarks  that  the  question  of  miracles 
is  really  "shut  up  in  the  enclosure  of  one  assumption, 
that  of  the  existence  of  God  "  ;  and  that  if  we  believe 
in  a  personal  Deity  with  all  power  over  nature,  that 
belief  brings  along  with  it  the  possibility  of  His  inter- 
rupting natural  order  for  His  own  purposes.  He  also 
bids  us  observe  that  the  idea  of  God  which  reason 
gives  us  is  exposed  to  resistance  of  the  same  kind, 


VIII  mozley's  bampton  lectures  119 

and  from  precisely  the  same  forces,  in  our  mental 
constitution,  as  the  idea  of  miracles.  When  reason 
has  finished  its  overwhelming  proof,  still  there  is  a 
step  to  be  taken  before  the  mind  embraces  the 
equally  overwhelming  conclusion — a  step  which  calls 
for  a  distinct  effort,  which  obliges  the  mind,  satisfied 
as  it  may  be,  to  beat  back  the  counteracting  pressure 
of  what  is  visible  and  customary.  After  reason — not 
opposed  to  it  or  independent  of  it,  but  growing  out 
of  it,  yet  a  distinct  and  further  movement — comes 
faith.  This  is  the  case,  not  specially  in  religion,  but 
in  all  subjects,  where  the  conclusions  of  reason  cannot 
be  subjected  to  immediate  verification.  How  often, 
as  he  observes,  do  we  see  persons  "  who,  when  they 
are  in  possession  of  the  best  arguments,  and  what  is 
more,  understand  those  arguments,  are  still  shaken  by 
almost  any  opposition,  because  they  want  the  faculty 
to  trust  an  argument  when  they  have  got  one." 

Not,  however,  that  the  existence  of  a  God  is  so 
clearly  seen  by  reason  as  to  dispense  with  faith  ;  not  from 
any  want  of  cogency  in  the  reasons,  but  from  the  amazing 
nature  of  the  conclusion — that  it  is  so  unparalleled, 
transcendent,  and  inconceivable  a  truth  to  believe.  It 
requires  trust  to  commit  oneself  to  the  conclusion  of  any 
reasoning,  however  strong,  when  such  as  this  is  the 
conclusion  :  to  put  enough  dependence  and  reliance  upon 
any  premisses,  to  accept  upon  the  strength  of  them  so 
immense  a  result.  The  issue  of  the  argument  is  so 
astonishing  that  if  we  do  not  tremble  for  its  safety,  it 
must  be  on  account  of  a  practical  principle  in  our  minds 


120  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

which  enables  us  to  co7ifide  and  trust  in  reasons,  when 
they  are  really  strong  and  good  ones.  .  .  .  Faith,  when 
for  convenience'  sake  we  do  distinguish  it  from  reason, 
is  not  distinguished  from  reason  by  the  want  of  premisses, 
but  by  the  nature  of  the  conclusions.  Are  our  conclusions 
of  the  customary  type  ?  Then  custom  imparts  the  full 
sense  of  security.  Are  they  not  of  the  customary,  but  of 
a  strange  and  unknown  type  ?  Then  the  mechanical 
sense  of  security  is  wanting,  and  a  certain  trust  is  required 
for  reposing  in  them,  which  we  call  faith.  But  that  which 
draws  these  conclusions  is  in  either  case  reason.  We 
infer,  we  go  upon  reasons,  we  use  premisses  in  either 
case.  The  premisses  of  faith  are  not  so  palpable  as 
those  of  ordinary  reason,  but  they  are  as  real  and  solid 
premisses  all  the  same.  Our  faith  in  the  existence  of  a 
God  and  a  future  state  is  founded  upon  reasons  as  much 
so  as  the  belief  in  the  commonest  kind  of  facts.  The 
reasons  are  in  themselves  as  strong,  but,  because  the 
conclusions  are  marvellous  and  are  not  seconded  and 
backed  by  known  parallels  or  by  experience,  we  do  not 
so  passively  acquiesce  in  them  ;  there  is  an  exertion  of 
confidence  in  depending  upon  them  and  assuring  ourselves 
of  their  force.  The  inward  energy  of  the  reason  has  to 
be  evoked,  when  she  can  no  longer  lean  upon  the  out- 
ward prop  of  custom,  but  is  thrown  back  upon  herself 
and  the  intrinsic  force  of  her  premisses.  Which  reason, 
not  leaning  upon  custom,  is  faith  ;  she  obtains  the  latter 
name  when  she  depends  entirely  upon  her  own  insight 
into  certain  grounds,  premisses,  and  evidences,  and 
follows  it  though  it  leads  to  transcendent,  unparalleled, 
and  supernatural  conclusions.   .   .   . 

Indeed,  does  not  our  heart  bear  witness  to  the  fact 


VIII  mozley's  BAMPTON  LECTUKES  121 

that  to  believe  in  a  God  is  an  exercise  of  faith  ?  That 
the  universe  was  produced  by  the  will  of  a  personal 
Being,  that  its  infinite  forces  are  all  the  power  of  that 
one  Being,  its  infinite  relations  the  perceptions  of  one 
Mind — would  not  this,  if  any  truth  could,  demand  the 
application  of  the  maxim.  Credo  quia  hnpossibile  ?  Look 
at  it  only  as  a  conception,  and  does  the  wildest  fiction  of 
the  imagination  equal  it  ?  No  premisses,  no  arguments 
therefore,  can  so  accommodate  this  truth  to  us  as  not  to 
leave  the  belief  in  it  an  act  of  mental  ascent  and  trust, 
of  faith  as  distinguished  from  sight.  Divest  reason  of  its 
trust,  and  the  universe  stops  at  the  impersonal  stage — 
there  is  no  God  ;  and  yet,  if  the  first  step  in  religion  is 
the  greatest,  how  is  it  that  the  freest  and  boldest 
speculator  rarely  declines  it  ?  How  is  it  that  the  most 
mysterious  of  all  truths  is  a  universally  accepted  one  ? 
What  is  it  which  guards  this  truth  ?  What  is  it  which 
makes  men  shrink  from  denying  it  ?  Why  is  atheism  a 
crime  ?  Is  it  that  authority  still  reigns  upon  one  ques- 
tion, and  that  the  voice  of  all  ages  is  too  potent  to  be 
withstood  ? 

But  the  progress  of  civilisation  and  thought  has 
impressed  this  amazing  idea  on  the  general  mind. 
It  is  no  matter-of-course  conception.  The  difficulties 
attending  it  were  long  insuperable  to  the  deepest 
thought  as  well  as  to  popular  belief ;  and  the  triumph 
of  the  modern  and  Christian  idea  of  God  is  the 
result  not  merely  of  the  eager  forwardness  of  faith, 
but  of  the  patient  and  inquiring  waiting  of  reason. 
And  the  question,  whether  we  shall  pronounce 
the  miraculous  to  be  impossible  as  such,  is  really 


122  MOZLEY'S  BA^IPTON  lectures  VIII 

the  question   whether  we  shall  once  more   let   this 
belief  go. 

The  conception  of  a  limited  Deity  then,  i.e.  a  Being 
really  circumscribed  in  power,  and  not  verbally  only  by 
a  confinement  to  necessary  truth,  is  at  variance  with  our 
fundamental  idea  of  a  God  ;  to  depart  from  which  is  to 
retrograde  from  modern  thought  to  ancient,  and  to  go 
from  Christianity  back  again  to  Paganism.  The  God  of 
ancient  religion  was  either  not  a  personal  Being  or  not 
an  omnipotent  Being  ;  the  God  of  modern  religion  is 
both.  For,  indeed,  civilisation  is  not  opposed  to  faith. 
The  idea  of  the  Supreme  Being  in  the  mind  of  European 
society  now  is  more  primitive,  more  childlike,  more 
imaginative  than  the  idea  of  the  ancient  Brahman  or 
Alexandrian  philosopher  ;  it  is  an  idea  which  both  of 
these  would  have  derided  as  the  notion  of  a  child — a 
negotiosiis  Dens.,  who  interposes  in  human  affairs  and 
answers  prayers.  So  far  from  the  philosophical  con- 
ception of  the  Deity  having  advanced  with  civilisation, 
and  the  poetical  receded,  the  philosophical  has  receded 
and  the  poetical  advanced.  The  God  of  whom  it  is  said, 
"  Are  not  five  sparrows  sold  for  two  farthings,  and  not 
one  of  them  is  forgotten  before  God  ;  but  even  the  very 
hairs  of  your  head  are  numbered,"  is  the  object  of  modern 
worship.  Nor,  again,  has  civilisation  shown  any  signs  of 
rejecting  doctrine.  Certain  ages  are,  indeed,  called  the 
ages  of  faith  ;  but  the  bulk  of  society  in  this  age  believes 
that  it  lives  under  a  supernatural  dispensation,  and 
accepts  truths  which  are  not  less  supernatural,  though 
they  have  more  proof,  than  some  doctrines  of  the  Middle 
Ages  ;  and,  if  so,  this  is  an  age  of  faith.      It  is  true  that 


VIII  mozley's  bampton  lectures  123 

most  people  do  not  live  up  to  their  faith  now  ;  neither 
did  they  in  the  Middle  Ages. 

Has  not  modern  philosophy,  again,  shown  both  more 
strength  and  acuteness,  and  also  more  faith,  than  the 
ancient  ?  I  speak  of  the  main  current.  Those  ancient 
thinkers  who  reduced  the  Supreme  Being  to  a  negation, 
with  all  their  subtlety,  wanted  strength,  and  settled 
questions  by  an  easier  test  than  that  of  modern  philo- 
sophy. The  merit  of  a  modern  metaphysician  is,  like 
that  of  a  good  chemist  or  naturalist,  accurate  observation 
in  noting  the  facts  of  mind.  Is  there  a  contradiction  in 
the  idea  of  creation  ?  Is  there  a  contradiction  in  the 
idea  of  a  personal  Infinite  Being  ?  He  examines  his 
own  mind,  and  if  he  does  not  see  one,  he  passes  the 
idea.  But  the  ancient  speculators  decided,  without 
examination  of  the  true  facts  of  mind,  by  a  kind  of 
philosophical  fancy ;  and,  according  to  this  loose  criterion, 
the  creation  of  matter  and  a  personal  Infinite  Being 
were  impossibilities,  for  they  mistook  the  inconceivable 
for  the  impossible.  And  thus  a  stringent  test  has 
admitted  what  a  loose  but  capricious  test  discarded,  and 
the  true  notion  of  God  has  issued  safe  out  of  the  crucible 
of  modern  metaphysics.  Reason  has  shown  its  strength, 
but  then  it  has  turned  that  strength  back  upon  itself ;  it 
has  become  its  own  critic  ;  and  in  becoming  its  own 
critic  it  has  become  its  own  check. 

If  the  belief,  then,  in  a  personal  Deity  lies  at  the 
bottom  of  all  religious  and  virtuous  practice,  and  if  the 
removal  of  it  would  be  a  descent  for  human  nature,  the 
withdrawal  of  its  inspiration  and  support,  and  a  fall  in  its 
whole  standard  ;  the  failure  of  the  very  breath  of  moral 
life  in  the  individual   and   in   society ;    the   decay  and 


124  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

degeneration  of  the  very  stock  of  mankind  ; — does  a 
theory  which  would  withdraw  miraculous  action  from  the 
Deity  interfere  with  that  belief?  If  it  would,  it  is  but 
prudent  to  count  the  cost  of  that  interference.  Would  a 
Deity  deprived  of  miraculous  action  possess  action 
at  all  ?  And  would  a  God  who  cannot  act  be  a 
God  ?  If  this  would  be  the  issue,  such  an  issue 
is  the  very  last  which  religious  men  can  desire. 
The  question  here  has  been  all  throughout,  not 
whether  upon  any  ground,  but  whether  upon  a  religious 
ground  and  by  religious  believers,  the  miraculous  as 
such  could  be  rejected.  But  to  that  there  is  but  one 
answer  —  that  it  is  impossible  in  reason  to  separate 
religion  from  the  supernatural,  and  upon  a  religious 
basis  to  overthrow  miracles.   .   .   . 

And  so  we  arrive  again  by  another  route  at  the  old 
turning  question  ;  for  the  question  whether  man  is  or  is 
not  the  vertex  of  nature,  is  the  question  whether  there  is 
or  is  not  a  God.  Does  free  agency  stop  at  the  human 
stage,  or  is  there  a  sphere  of  free-will  above  the  human, 
in  which,  as  in  the  human,  not  physical  law  but  spirit 
moves  matter  ?  And  does  that  free-will  penetrate  the 
universal  frame  invisibly  to  us,  an  omnipresent  agent  ?  If 
so,  every  miracle  in  Scripture  is  as  natural  an  event  in 
the  universe  as  any  chemical  experiment  in  the  physical 
world  ;  if  not,  the  seat  of  the  great  Presiding  Will  is 
empty,  and  nature  has  no  Personal  Head  ;  man  is  her 
highest  point ;  he  finishes  her  ascent ;  though  by  this 
very  sipremacy  he  falls,  for  under  fate  he  is  not  free 
himself  ;  all  nature  either  ascends  to  God,  or  descends  to 
law.  Is  there  above  the  level  of  material  causes  a  region 
of  Proviaencc  ?      If  there  is,  nature  there  is  moved  by 


VIII  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  125 

the  Supreme  Free  Agent  ;  and  of  such  a  realm  a  miracle 
is  the  natural  production. 

Two  rationales  of  miracles  thus  present  themselves 
to  our  choice  ;  one  more  accommodating  to  the  physical 
imagination  and  easy  to  fall  in  with,  on  a  level  with 
custom,  common  conceptions,  and  ordinary  history,  and 
requiring  no  ascent  of  the  mind  to  embrace,  viz.  the 
solution  of  miracles  as  the  growth  of  fancy  and  legend  ; 
the  other  requiring  an  ascent  of  the  reason  to  embrace 
it,  viz.  the  rationale  of  the  supremacy  of  a  Personal  Will 
in  nature.  The  one  is  the  explanation  to  which  we  fall 
when  we  dare  not  trust  our  reason,  but  mistake  its  in- 
conceivable truths  for  sublime  but  unsubstantial  visions  ; 
the  other  is  that  to  which  we  rise  when  we  dare  trust  our 
reason,  and  the  evidences  which  it  lays  before  us  of  the 
existence  of  a  Personal  Supreme  Being. 

The  belief  in  a  personal  God  thus  bringing  with  it 
the  possibility  of  miracles,  w-hat  reason  then  has  to 
judge  is  whether  it  can  accept  miracles  as  such,  or  any 
set  of  miracles,  as  worthy  of  a  reasonable  conception 
of  the  Divine  Nature,  and  whether  it  can  be  fairly  said 
that  such  miracles  have  answered  a  purpose  which 
approves  itself  to  our  reason.  Testimony  will  always 
speak  at  a  disadvantage  till  we  are  assured  on  these 
points.  Into  the  subject  of  testimony  Mr.  Mozley 
enters  only  in  a  general  way,  though  his  remarks  on 
the  relation  of  testimony  to  facts  of  so  exceptional  a 
nature  as  miracles,  and  also  on  the  distinct  peculiarities 
of  Christian  evidence  as  contrasted  with  the  evidence 
of  all  other  classes  of  alleged  miracles,  are  marked  by 
a  characteristic  combination  of  acuteness,  precision, 


126  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

and  broad  practical  sobriety  and  moderation.  He 
rebukes  with  quiet  and  temperate  and  yet  resolute 
plainness  of  statement  the  misplaced  ingenuity  which, 
on  different  sides,  to  serve  very  different  causes,  has 
tried  to  confuse  and  perplex  the  claims  of  the  great 
Christian  miracles  by  comparisons  which  it  is  really 
mere  wantonness  to  make  with  later  ones ;  for,  be 
they  what  they  may,  it  is  certain  that  the  Gospel 
miracles,  in  nature,  in  evidence,  and  in  purpose  and 
result,  are  absolutely  unique  in  the  world,  and  have 
nothing  like  them.  And  though  the  book  mainly 
confines  itself  to  its  proper  subject,  the  antecedent 
question  of  credibility,  some  of  the  most  striking 
remarks  in  it  relate  to  the  way  in  which  the  purpose 
of  miracles  is  visible  in  those  of  Christianity,  and  has 
been  served  by  them.  A  miracle  is  an  instrument — 
an  instrument  without  which  revelation  is  impossible ; 
and  Mr.  Mozley  meets  Spinoza's  objection  to  the 
unmeaning  isolation  of  a  miracle  by  insisting  on  the 
distinction,  which  Spinoza  failed  to  see,  between  a 
miracle  simply  as  a  wonder  for  its  own  sake,  and  as  a 
means,  deriving  its  use  and  its  value  simply  from  the 
end  which  it  was  to  serve.  He  observes  that  all  the 
stupendous  "  marvels  of  nature  do  not  speak  to  us  in 
that  way  in  which  one  miracle  does,  because  they  do 
not  tell  us  that  we  are  not  like  themselves  " ;  and  he 
remarks  on  the  "perverse  determination  of  Spinoza 
to  look  at  miracles  in  that  aspect  which  does  not 
belong  to  them,  and  not  to  look  at  them  in  that 
aspect  which  does." 


VIII  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  127 

He  compares  miracles  with  nature,  and  then  says 
how  wise  is  the  order  of  nature,  how  meaningless  the 
violation  of  it  ;  how  expressive  of  the  Almighty  Mind  the 
one,  what  a  concealment  of  it  the  other !  But  no  one 
pretends  to  say  that  a  miracle  competes  with  nature,  in 
physical  purpose  and  effectiveness.  That  is  not  its 
object.  But  a  miracle,  though  it  does  not  profess  to 
compete  with  nature  upon  its  rival's  own  ground,  has  a 
ghostly  force  and  import  which  nature  has  not.  If  real, 
it  is  a  token,  more  pointed  and  direct  than  physical  order 
can  be,  of  another  world,  and  of  Moral  Being  and  Will 
in  that  world. 

Thus,  regarding  miracles  as  means  to  fulfil  a 
purpose,  Mr.  Mozley  shows  what  has  come  of  them. 
His  lecture  on  "  Miracles  regarded  in  their  Practical 
Result  "  is  excelled  by  some  of  the  others  as  examples 
of  subtle  and  searching  thought  and  well-balanced  and 
compact  argument;  but  it  is  a  fine  example  of  the  way 
in  which  a  familiar  view  can  have  fresh  colour  and  force 
thrown  into  it  by  the  way  in  which  it  is  treated.  He 
shows  that  it  is  impossible  in  fact  to  separate  from  the 
miracles  in  which  it  professed  to  begin,  the  greatest 
and  deepest  moral  change  which  the  world  has  ever 
known.  This  change  was  made  not  by  miracles  but 
by  certain  doctrines.  The  Epistle  to  the  Romans 
surveyed  the  moral  failure  of  the  world ;  St.  Paul 
looked  on  the  chasm  between  knowledge  and  action, 
the  "  unbridged  gulf,  this  incredible  inability  of  man 
to  do  what  was  right,  with  profound  wonder " ;  but 
in  the  face  of  this  hopeless  spectacle  he  dared  to 


128  MOZLEY'S  BAMrTON  LECTURES  viii 

prophesy  the  moral  elevation  which  we  have  witnessed, 
and  the  power  to  which  he  looked  to  bring  it  about 
was  the  Christian  doctrines.  St.  Paul  "takes  what 
may  be  called  the  high  view  of  human  nature — i.e. 
what  human  nature  is  capable  of  when  the  proper 
motive  and  impulse  is  applied  to  it."  He  sees  in  Chris- 
tian doctrine  that  strong  force  which  is  to  break  down 
"  the  vis  inertiae  of  man,  to  set  human  nature  going, 
to  touch  the  spring  of  man's  heart  ";  and  he  compares 
with  St.  Paul's  doctrines  and  hopefulness  the  doctrinal 
barrenness,  the  despair  of  Mohammedanism  : — 

If  one  had  to  express  in  a  short  compass  the 
character  of  its  remarkable  founder  as  a  teacher,  it 
would  be  that  that  great  man  had  no  faith  in  human 
nature.  There  were  two  things  which  he  thought  man 
could  do  and  would  do  for  the  glory  of  God — transact 
religious  forms,  and  fight ;  and  upon  those  two  points  he 
was  severe  ;  but  within  the  sphere  of  common  practical 
life,  where  man's  great  trial  lies,  his  code  exhibits  the 
disdainful  laxity  of  a  legislator  who  accommodates  his 
rule  to  the  recipient,  and  shows  his  estimate  of  the 
recipient  by  the  accommodation  which  he  adopts.  Did 
we  search  history  for  a  contrast,  we  could  hardly  discover 
a  deeper  one  than  that  between  St.  Paul's  overflowing 
standard  of  the  capabilities  of  human  nature  and  the 
oracular  cynicism  of  the  great  false  Prophet.  The 
writer  of  the  Koran  does,  indeed,  if  any  discerner  of 
hearts  ever  did,  take  the  measure  of  mankind  ;  and  his 
measure  is  the  same  that  Satire  has  taken,  only  expressed 
with  the  majestic  brevity  of  one  who  had  once  lived  in 
the  realm  of  Silence.      "  Man  is  weak,"  says  Mahomet. 


VIII  .    MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  129 

And  upon  that  maxim  he  legislates.  .  .  .  The  keenness 
of  Mahomet's  insight  into  human  nature,  a  wide  know- 
ledge of  its  temptations,  persuasives,  influences  under 
which  it  acts,  a  vast  immense  capacity  of  forbearance  for 
it,  half  grave  half  genial,  half  sympathy  half  scorn,  issue 
in  a  somewhat  Horatian  model,  the  character  of  the  man 
of  experience  who  despairs  of  any  change  in  man,  and 
lays  down  the  maxim  that  we  must  take  him  as  we  find 
him.  It  was  indeed  his  supremacy  in  both  faculties,  the 
largeness  of  the  passive  nature  and  the  splendour  of 
action,  that  constituted  the  secret  of  his  success.  The 
breadth  and  flexibility  of  mind  that  could  negotiate  with 
every  motive  of  interest,  passion,  and  pride  in  man  is 
surprising  ;  there  is  boundless  sagacity  ;  what  is  wanting 
is  hope,  a  belief  in  the  capabilities  of  human  nature. 
There  is  no  upward  flight  in  the  teacher's  idea  of  man. 
Instead  of  which,  the  notion  of  the  power  of  earth,  and 
the  impossibility  of  resisting  it,,  depresses  his  whole  aim, 
and  the  shadow  of  the  tomb  falls  upon  the  work  of  the 
great  false  Prophet. 

The  idea  of  God  is  akin  to  the  idea  of  man.  "  He 
knows  us,"  says  Mahomet.  God's  hiowledge^  the  vast 
experience^  so  to  speak,  of  the  Divine  Being,  His  in- 
finite acquaintance  with  man's  frailties  and  temptations, 
is  appealed  to  as  the  ground  of  confidence.  "  He  is  the 
Wise,  the  Knowing  One,"  "  He  is  the  Knowing,  the 
Wise,"  "  He  is  easy  to  be  reconciled."  Thus  is  raised 
a  notion  of  the  Supreme  Being,  which  is  rather  an 
extension  of  the  character  of  the  large-minded  and 
sagacious  man  of  the  world  than  an  extension  of  man's 
virtue  and  hoHness.  He  forgives  because  He  knows  too 
much  to  be  rigid,  because  sin  universal  ceases  to  be  sin, 

VOL.  II  K 


130  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  viii 

and  must  be  given  way  to.  Take  a  man  who  has  had 
large  opportunity  of  studying  mankind,  and  has  come 
into  contact  with  every  form  of  human  weakness  and 
corruption  ;  such  a  man  is  indulgent  as  a  simple  con- 
sequence of  his  knowledge,  because  nothing  surprises 
him.  So  the  God  of  Mahomet  forgives  by  reason  of 
His  vast  knowledge. 

In  contrast  with  the  fruit  of  this  he  observes  that 
"the  prophecy  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  has 
been  fulfilled,  and  that  doctrine  has  been  historically 
at  the  bottom  of  a  great  change  of  moral  practice  in 
mankind."  The  key  has  been  found  to  set  man's 
moral  nature  in  action,  to  check  and  reverse  that 
course  of  universal  failure  manifest  before ;  and  this 
key  is  Christian  doctrine.  "A  stimulus  has  been 
given  to  human  nature  which  has  extracted  an  amount 
of  action  from  it  which  no  Greek  or  Roman  could 
have  believed  possible."  It  is  inconceivable  that 
but  for  such  doctrine  such  results  as  have  been  seen 
in  Christendon  would  have  followed ;  and  were  it 
now  taken  away  we  cannot  see  anything  else  that 
would  have  the  faintest  expectation  of  taking  its 
place.  "Could  we  commit  mankind  to  a  moral 
Deism  without  trembling  for  the  result?"  Can  the 
enthusiasm  for  the  divinity  of  human  nature  stand 
the  test  of  clear,  unsparing  observation?  Would  it 
not  issue  in  such  an  estimate  of  human  nature  as 
Mahomet  took  ?  "A  deification  of  humanity  upon  its 
own  grounds,  an  exaltation  which  is  all  height  and  no 
depth,  wants  power  because  it  wants  truth.     It  is  not 


VIII  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTON  LECTURES  131 

founded  upon  the  facts  of  human  nature,  and  there- 
fore issues  in  vain  and  vapid  aspiration,  and  injures 
the  soHdity  of  man's  character."  As  he  says,  "The 
Gospel  doctrine  of  the  Incarnation  and  its  effects 
alone  unites  the  sagacious  view  of  human  nature  with 
the  enthusiastic."  And  now  what  is  the  historical 
root  and  basis  from  which  this  one  great  moral  revolu- 
tion in  the  world's  history,  so  successful,  so  fruitful, 
so  inexhaustible,  has  started  ? 

But  if,  as  the  source  and  inspiration  of  practice, 
doctrine  has  been  the  foundation  of  a  new  state  of  the 
world,  and  of  that  change  which  distinguishes  the  world 
under  Christianity  from  the  world  before  it,  miracles, 
as  the  proof  of  that  doctrine,  stand  before  us  in  a  very 
remarkable  and  peculiar  light.  Far  from  being  mere 
idle  feats  of  power  to  gratify  the  love  of  the  marvellous  ; 
far  even  from  being  mere  particular  and  occasional 
rescues  from  the  operation  of  general  laws, — they  come 
before  us  as  means  for  accomplishing  the  largest  and 
most  important  practical  object  that  has  ever  been 
accomplished  in  the  history  of  mankind.  They  lie  at 
the  bottom  of  the  difference  of  the  modern  from  the 
ancient  world  ;  so  far,  z>.,  as  that  difference  is  moral. 
We  see  as  a  fact  a  change  in  the  moral  condition  of 
mankind,  which  marks  ancient  and  modern  society  as 
two  different  states  of  mankind.  What  has  produced 
this  change,  and  elicited  this  new  power  of  action  ? 
Doctrine.  And  what  was  the  proof  of  that  doctrine,  or 
essential  to  the  proof  of  it  ?  Miracles.  The  greatness 
of  the  result  thus  throws  light  upon  the  propriety  of  the 
means,  and  shows  the  fitting  object  which  was  presented 


132  MOZLEY'S  BAMPTOX  lectures  VIII 

for  the  introduction  of  such  means — the  fitting  occasion 
which  had  arisen  for  the  use  of  them  ;  for,  indeed,  no 
more  weighty,  grand,  or  solemn  occasion  can  be  con- 
ceived than  the  foundation  of  such  a  new  order  of  things 
in  the  world.  Extraordinary  action  of  Divine  power 
for  such  an  end  has  the  benefit  of  a  justifying  object  of 
incalculable  weight  ;  which  though  not  of  itself,  indeed, 
proof  of  the  fact,  comes  with  striking  force  upon  the 
mind  in  connection  with  the  proper  proof  It  is  reason- 
able, it  is  inevitable,  that  we  should  be  impressed  by  such 
a  result ;  for  it  shows  that  the  miraculous  system  has 
been  a  practical  one ;  that  it  has  been  a  step  in  the 
ladder  of  man's  ascent,  the  means  of  introducing  those 
powerful  truths  which  have  set  his  moral  nature  in 
action. 

Of  this  work,  remarkable  in  so  many  \vays,  we 
will  add  but  one  thing  more.  It  is  marked  throughout 
with  the  most  serious  and  earnest  conviction,  but  it 
is  without  a  single  word,  from  first  to  last,  of  asperity 
or  insinuation  against  opponents ;  and  this,  not  from 
any  deficiency  of  feeling  as  to  the  importance  of  the 
issue,  but  from  a  deliberate  and  resolutely  maintained 
self-control,  and  from  an  overruhng  ever-present 
sense  of  the  duty,  on  themes  like  these,  of  a  more 
than  judicial  calmness. 


IX 

ECCE  HOMQi 

This  Is  a  dangerous  book  to  review.  The  critic  of  it, 
if  he  is  prudent,  will  feel  that  it  is  more  than  most 
books  a  touchstone  of  his  own  capacity,  and  that  in 
giving  his  judgment  upon  it  he  cannot  help  giving  his 
own  measure  and  betraying  what  he  is  himself  worth. 
All  the  unconscious  guiding  which  a  name,  even  if 
hitherto  unknown,  gives  to  opinion  is  wanting.  The 
first  aspect  of  the  book  is  perplexing ;  closer  examina- 
tion does  not  clear  up  all  the  questions  which  present 
themselves ;  and  many  people,  after  they  have  read  it 
through,  will  not  feel  quite  certain  what  it  means. 
Much  of  what  is  on  the  surface  and  much  of  what  is 
inherent  in  the  nature  of  the  work  will  jar  painfully 
on  many  minds  ;  while  others  who  begin  to  read  it 
under  one  set  of  impressions  may  by  the  time  they 
have  got  to  the  end  complain  of  having  been  taken 
in.  There  can  be  no  doubt  on  which  side  the  book 
is ;  but  it  may  be  open  to  debate  from  which  side  it 

^  Ecce  Homo  :  A  Swvey  of  the  Life  and  Work  of  Jesus  Christ. 
Guardian,  7th  February  1866, 


134  ECCE  HOMO  IX 

has  come.  The  unknown  champion  who  comes  into 
the  lists  with  barred  vizor  and  no  cognisance  on  his 
shield  leaves  it  not  long  uncertain  for  which  of  the 
contending  parties  he  appears ;  but  his  weapons  and 
his  manner  of  fighting  are  not  the  ordinary  ones  of 
the  side  which  he  takes  ;  and  there  is  a  force  in  his 
arm,  and  a  sweep  in  his  stroke,  which  is  not  that  of 
common  men.  The  book  is  one  which  it  is  easy  to 
take  exception  to,  and  perhaps  still  easier  to  praise  at 
random ;  but  the  subject  is  put  before  us  in  so  un- 
usual a  way,  and  one  so  removed  from  the  ordinary 
grooves  of  thought,  that  in  trying  to  form  an  adequate 
estimate  of  the  work  as  a  whole,  a  man  feels  as  he 
does  when  he  is  in  the  presence  of  something  utterly 
unfamihar  and  unique,  when  common  rules  and  in- 
ferences fail  him,  and  in  pronouncing  upon  which  he 
must  make  something  of  a  venture. 

In  making  our  own  venture  we  will  begin  with  what 
seems  to  us  incontestable.  In  the  first  place,  but 
that  it  has  been  questioned,  we  should  say  that  there 
could  be  no  question  of  the  surpassing  ability  which 
the  book  displays.  It  is  far  beyond  the  power  of  the 
average  clever  and  practised  writer  of  our  days.  It  is 
the  work  of  a  man  in  whom  thought,  sympathy,  and 
imagination  are  equally  powerful  and  wealthy,  and 
who  exercises  a  perfect  and  easy  command  over  his 
own  conceptions,  and  over  the  apt  and  vivid  language 
which  is  their  expression.  Few  men  have  entered  so 
deeply  into  the  ideas  and  feelings  of  the  time,  or  have 
looked  at  the  world,  its   history  and   its  conditions, 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  135 

with  so  large  and  piercing  an  insight.  But  it  is  idle 
to  dwell  on  what  must  strike,  at  first  sight,  any  one 
who  but  opens  the  book.  We  go  on  to  observe,  what 
is  equally  beyond  dispute,  the  deep  tone  of  religious 
seriousness  which  pervades  the  work.  The  writer's 
way  of  speaking  is  very  different  from  that  of  the 
ascetic  or  the  devotee;  but  no  ascetic  or  devotee 
could  be  more  profoundly  penetrated  with  the  great 
contrast  between  holiness  and  evil,  and  show  more 
clearly  in  his  whole  manner  of  thinking  the  inefface- 
able impression  of  the  powers  of  the  world  to  come. 
Whatever  else  the  book  may  be,  this  much  is  plain  on 
the  face  of  it — it  is  the  work  of  a  mind  of  extreme 
originality,  depth,  refinement,  and  power;  and  it  is 
also  the  work  of  a  very  religious  man :  Thomas  a 
Kempis  had  not  a  more  solemn  sense  of  things  unseen 
and  of  what  is  meant  by  the  Imitation  of  Christ. 

What  the  writer  wishes  his  book  to  be  understood 
to  be  we  must  gather  from  his  Preface  : — 

Those  who  feel  dissatisfied  with  the  current  con- 
ceptions of  Christ,  if  they  cannot  rest  content  without  a 
definite  opinion,  may  find  it  necessary  to  do  what  to 
persons  not  so  dissatisfied  it  seems  audacious  and 
perilous  to  do.  They  may  be  obliged  to  reconsider  the 
whole  subject  from  the  beginning,  and  placing  them- 
selves in  imagination  at  the  time  when  he  whom  we  call 
Christ  bore  no  such  name,  but  was  simply,  as  St.  Luke 
describes  him,  a  young  man  of  promise,  popular  with 
those  who  knew  him,  and  appearing  to  enjoy  the  Divine 
favour,  to  trace  his  biography  from  point  to  point,  and 


136  ECCE  nOMO  IX 

accept  those  conclusions  about  him,  not  which  church 
doctors  or  even  apostles  have  sealed  with  their  authority, 
but  which  the  facts  themselves,  critically  weighed,  appear 
to  warrant. 

This  is  what  the  present  writer  undertook  to  do  for 
the  satisfaction  of  his  own  mind,  and  because,  after  read- 
ing a  good  many  books  on  Christ,  he  felt  still  constrained 
to  confess  that  there  was  no  historical  character  whose 
motives,  objects,  and  feelings  remained  so  incompre- 
hensible to  him.  The  inquiry  which  proved  serviceable 
to  himself  may  chance  to  be  useful  to  others. 

What  is  now  published  is  a  fragment.  No  theo- 
logical questions  whatever  are  here  discussed.  Christ, 
as  the  creator  of  modern  theology  and  religion,  will  make 
the  subject  of  another  volume,  which,  however,  the 
author  does  not  hope  to  publish  for  some  time  to  come. 
In  the  meanwhile  he  has  endeavoured  to  furnish  an 
answer  to  the  question.  What  was  Christ's  object  in 
founding  the  Society  which  is  called  by  his  name,  and 
how  is  it  adapted  to  attain  that  object  ? 

Thus  the  book  comes  before  us  as  a  serious  facing 
of  difficulties.  And  that  the  writer  lays  stress  on  its 
being  so  viewed  appears  further  from  a  letter  which 
he  wrote  to  the  Spectator^  repeating  emphatically  that 
the  book  is  not  one  "  written  after  the  investigation 
was  completed,  but  the  ifivestigation  itself."  The  letter 
may  be  taken  to  complete  the  statement  of  the  Pre- 
face : — 

I  endeavoured  in  my  Preface  to  describe  the  state 
of  mind  in  which  I  undertook  my  book.  I  said  that  the 
character    and    objects    of    Christ    were    at    that     time 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  137 

altogether  incomprehensible  to  me,  and  that  I  wished  to 
try  whether  an  independent  investigation  would  relieve 
my  perplexity.  Perhaps  I  did  not  distinctly  enough 
state  that  Ecce  Homo  is  not  a  book  written  after  the 
investigation  was  completed,  but  the  investigatio7i  itself. 

The  Life  of  Christ  is  partly  easy  to  understand  and 
partly  difficult.  This  being  so,  what  would  a  man  do 
who  wished  to  study  it  methodically  ?  Naturally  he 
would  take  the  easy  part  first.  He  would  collect, 
arrange,  and  carefully  consider  all  the  facts  which  are 
simple,  and  until  he  has  done  this,  he  would  carefully 
avoid  all  those  parts  of  his  subject  which  are  obscure, 
and  which  cannot  be  explained  without  making  bold 
hypotheses.  By  this  course  he  would  limit  the  problem, 
and  in  the  meanwhile  arrive  at  a  probable  opinion  con- 
cerning the  veracity  of  the  documents,  and  concerning 
the  characteristics,  both  intellectual  and  moral,  of  the 
person  whose  high  pretensions  he  wished  to  investigate. 

This  is  what  I  have  done.  I  have  postponed  alto- 
gether the  hardest  questions  connected  with  Christ,  as 
questions  which  cannot  properly  be  discussed  until  a 
considerable  quantity  of  evidence  has  been  gathered 
about  his  character  and  views.  If  this  evidence,  when 
collected,  had  appeared  to  be  altogether  conflicting  and 
inconsistent,  I  should  have  been  saved  the  trouble  of 
proceeding  any  further  ;  I  should  have  said  that  Christ 
is  a  myth.  If  it  had  been  consistent,  and  had  disclosed 
to  me  a  person  of  mean  and  ambitious  aims,  I  should 
have  said,  Christ  is  a  deceiver.  Again,  if  it  had  ex- 
hibited a  person  of  weak  understanding  and  strong 
impulsive  sensibility,  I  should  have  said  Christ  is  a 
bewildered  enthusiast. 


138  ECCE  HOMO  ix 

In  all  these  cases  you  perceive  my  method  would 
have  saved  me  a  good  deal  of  trouble.  As  it  is,  I 
certainly  feel  bound  to  go  on,  though,  as  I  say  in  my 
Preface,  my  progress  will  necessarily  be  slow.  But  I 
am  much  engaged  and  have  little  time  for  theological 
study.  But  pray  do  not  suppose  that  postponing  ques- 
tions is  only  another  name  for  evading  them.  I  think  I 
have  gained  much  by  this  postponement.  I  have  now  a 
very  definite  notion  of  Christ's  character  and  that  of  his 
followers.  I  shall  be  able  to  judge  how  far  he  was 
likely  to  deceiv^e  himself  or  them.  It  is  possible  I  may 
have  put  others,  who  can  command  more  time  than  I, 
in  a  condition  to  take  up  the  subject  where  for  the 
present  I  leave  it. 

You  say  my  picture  suffers  by  my  method.  But 
Ecce  Homo  is  not  a  picture  :  it  is  the  very  opposite  of  a 
picture  ;  it  is  an  analysis.  It  may  be,  you  will  answer, 
that  the  title  suggests  a  picture.  This  may  perhaps  be 
true,  and  if  so,  it  is  no  doubt  a  fault,  but  a  fault  in  the 
title,  not  in  the  book.  For  titles  are  put  to  books,  not 
books  to  titles. 

Thus  it  appears  that  the  writer  found  it  his  duty  to 
investigate  those  awful  questions  which  every  thinking 
man  feels  to  be  full  of  the  "  incomprehensible  "  and 
unfathomable,  but  which  many  thinking  men,  for 
various  reasons  both  good  and  bad,  shrink  from 
attempting  to  investigate,  accepting  on  practical  and 
very  sufficient  grounds  the  religious  conclusions 
which  are  recommended  and  sanctioned  by  the 
agreement  of  Christendom.  And  finding  it  his  duty 
to  investigate  them  at  all,  he  saw  that  he  was  bound 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  139 

to  investigate  in  earnest.  But  under  what  circum- 
stances this  happened,  from  what  particular  pressure 
of  need,  and  after  what  previous  belief  or  state  of 
opinion,  we  are  not  told.  Whether  from  being  origin- 
ally on  the  doubting  side — on  the  irreligious  side  we 
cannot  suppose  he  ever  could  have  been — he  has 
risen  through  his  investigation  into  belief;  or  whether, 
originally  on  the  believing  side,  he  found  the  aspect 
so  formidable,  to  himself  or  to  the  world,  of  the  diffi- 
culties and  perplexities  which  beset  belief,  that  he 
turned  to  bay  upon  the  foes  that  dogged  him — must 
be  left  to  conjecture.  It  is  impossible  to  question 
that  he  has  been  deeply  impressed  with  the  difficulties 
of  believing ;  it  is  impossible  to  question  that  doubt 
has  been  overborne  and  trampled  under  foot.  But 
here  we  have  the  record,  it  would  not  be  accurate  to 
say  of  the  struggle,  but  of  that  resolute  and  unflinch- 
ing contemplation  of  the  realities  of  the  case  which 
decided  it.  Such  plunging  into  such  a  question  must 
seem,  as  he  says,  to  those  who  do  not  need  it,  "  auda- 
cious and  perilous  " ;  for  if  you  plunge  into  a  ques- 
tion in  earnest,  and  do  not  under  a  thin  disguise  take 
a  side,  you  must,  whatever  your  bias  and  expectation, 
take  your  chance  of  the  alternative  answers  which 
may  come  out.  It  is  a  simple  fact  that  there  are 
many  people  who  feel  "  dissatisfied  with  the  current 
conceptions"  of  our  Lord — whether  reasonably  and 
justly  dissatisfied  is  another  question;  but  whatever 
we  think  of  it  they  remain  dissatisfied.  In  such 
emergencies  it  is  conceivable  that  a  man  who  believes, 


140  ECCE  HOMO  ix 

yet  keenly  realises  and  feels  what  disturbs  or  destroys 
the  belief  of  others,  should  dare  to  put  himself  in 
their  place ;  should  enter  the  hospital  and  suffer  the 
disease  which  makes  such  ravages ;  should  descend 
into  the  shades  and  face  the  spectres.  No  one  can 
deny  the  risk  of  dwelling  on  such  thoughts  as  he  must 
dwell  on ;  but  if  he  feels  warmly  with  his  kind,  he 
may  think  it  even  a  duty  to  face  the  risk.  To  any 
one  accustomed  to  live  on  his  belief  it  cannot  but  be 
a  hard  necessity,  full  of  pain  and  difficulty,  first  to 
think  and  then  to  speak  of  w^hat  he  believes,  as  if  it 
might  not  be,  or  cotdd  be  otherwise ;  but  the  changes 
of  time  bring  up  ever  new  hard  necessities ;  and  one 
thing  is  plain,  that  if  ever  such  an  investigation  is 
undertaken,  it  ought  to  be  a  real  one,  in  good  earnest 
and  not  in  play.  If  a  man  investigates  at  all,  both 
for  his  own  sake  and  for  the  sake  of  the  effect  of  his 
investigation  on  others,  he  must  accept  the  fair  con- 
ditions of  investigation.  We  may  not  ourselves  be 
able  to  conceive  the  possibility  of  taking,  even  pro- 
visionally, a  neutral  position ;  but  looking  at  what  is 
going  on  all  round  us,  we  ought  to  be  able  to  enlarge 
our  thoughts  sufficiently  to  take  in  the  idea  that  a 
believing  mind  may  feel  it  a  duty  to  surrender  itself 
boldly  to  the  intellectual  chances  and  issues  of  the 
inquiry,  and  to  "let  its  thoughts  take  their  course  in 
the  confidence  that  they  will  come  home  at  last."  It 
may  be  we  ourselves  who  "have  not  faith  enough  to 
be  patient  of  doubt " ;  there  may  be  others  who  feel 
that   if  what  they  believe  is  real,  they  need  not  be 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  141 

afraid  of  the  severest  revisal  and  testing  of  the  con- 
victions on  which  they  rest;  who  feel  that,  in  the 
circumstances  of  the  time,  it  is  not  left  to  their  choice 
whether  these  convictions  shall  be  sifted  unsparingly 
and  to  the  uttermost ;  and  who  think  it  a  venture  not 
unworthy  of  a  Christian,  to  descend  even  to  the 
depths  to  go  through  the  thoughts  of  doubters,  if  so 
be  that  he  may  find  the  spell  that  shall  calm  them. 
We  do  not  say  that  this  book  is  the  production  of 
such  a  state  of  mind  ;  we  only  think  that  it  may  be. 
One  thing  is  clear,  wherever  the  writer's  present  lot  is 
cast,  he  has  that  in  him  which  not  only  enables  him, 
but  forces  him,  to  sympathise  with  what  he  sees  in 
the  opposite  camp.  If  he  is  what  is  called  a  Liberal, 
his  whole  heart  is  yet  pouring  itself  forth  towards  the 
great  truths  of  Christianity.  If  he  is  what  is  called 
orthodox,  his  whole  intellect  is  alive  to  the  right  and 
duty  of  freedom  of  thought.  He  will  therefore  attract 
and  repel  on  both  sides.  And  he  appears  to  feel  that 
the  position  of  double  sympathy  gives  him  a  special 
advantage,  to  attract  to  each  side  what  is  true  in  its 
opposite,  and  to  correct  in  each  what  is  false  or 
inadequate. 

What,  then,  is  this  investigation,  and  what  course 
does  it  follow  ?  At  the  first  aspect,  we  might  take  it 
for  one  of  those  numerous  attempts  on  the  Liberal 
side,  partly  impatient,  partly  careless  of  Christianity, 
to  put  a  fresh  look  on  the  Christian  history,  and  to 
see  it  with  new  eyes.  The  writer's  language  is  at 
Starting   neutral ;    he   speaks   of   our    Lord    in    the 


142  ECCE  HOMO 


IX 


language  indeed  of  the  New  Testament,  but  not  in 
the  usual  language  of  later  Christian  writers.  All 
through,  the  colour  and  tone  is  absolutely  modern  ; 
and  what  would  naturally  be  expressed  in  familiar 
theological  terms  is  for  the  most  part  studiously  put 
in  other  words.  Persons  acquainted  with  the  writings 
of  the  late  Mr.  Robertson  might  be  often  reminded  of 
his  favourite  modes  of  teaching ;  of  his  maxim  that 
truth  is  made  up  of  two  opposites  which  seem  con- 
tradictories ;  of  the  distinction  which  he  was  so  fond 
of  insisting  upon  between  principles  and  rules  ;  above 
all,  of  his  doctrine  that  the  true  way  to  rise  to  the 
faith  in  our  Lord's  Divine  Nature  was  by  first  realising 
His  Human  Life.  But  the  resemblance  is  partial,  if 
not  superficial,  and  gives  way  on  closer  examination 
before  broad  and  characteristic  features  of  an  entirely 
different  significance.  That  one  which  at  first  arrests 
attention,  and  distinguishes  this  writer's  line  of  thought 
from  the  common  Liberal  way  of  dealing  with  the 
subject,  is  that  from  the  first  page  of  the  book  to  its 
last  line  the  work  of  Christ  is  viewed,  not  simply  as 
the  foundation  of  a  religious  system,  the  introduction 
of  certain  great  principles,  the  elevation  of  religious 
ideas,  the  delivery  of  Divine  truths,  the  exhibition  of 
a  life  and  example,  but  as  the  call  and  creation  of  a 
definite,  concrete,  organised  society  of  men.  The 
subject  of  investigation  is  not  merely  the  character 
and  history  of  the  Person,  but  the  Person  as  connected 
with  His  work.  Christ  is  regarded  not  simply  in 
Himself  or  in   His  teaching,    as  the  Founder  of  a 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  143 

philosophy,  a  morality,  a  theology  in  the  abstract,  but 
as  the  Author  of  a  Divine  Society,  the  Body  which  is 
called  by  His  Name,  the  Christian  Church  Universal, 
a  real  and  visible  company  of  men,  which,  however 
we  may  understand  it,  exists  at  this  moment  as  it  has 
existed  since  His  time,  marked  by  His  badges, 
governed  by  His  laws,  and  working  out  His  purpose. 
The  writer  finds  the  two  joined  in  fact,  and  he  finds 
them  also  joined  in  the  recorded  history  of  Christ's 
plan.  The  book  might  almost  be  described  as  the 
beginning  of  a  new  De  Civitate  Dei,  written  with  the 
further  experience  of  fourteen  centuries  and  from  the 
point  of  view  of  our  own  generation.  This  is  one 
remarkable  peculiarity  of  this  investigation;  another  is 
the  prominence  given  to  the  severe  side  of  the  Person 
and  character  of  whom  he  writes,  and  what  is  even 
more  observable,  the  way  in  which  both  the  severity 
and  the  gentleness  are  apprehended  and  harmonised. 
We  are  familiar  with  the  attempts  to  resolve  the 
Christianity  of  the  New  Testament  into  philanthropy ; 
and,  on  the  other  hand,  writers  like  Mr.  Carlyle 
will  not  let  us  forget  that  the  world  is  as  dark  and 
evil  as  the  Bible  draws  it.  This  writer  feels  both 
in  one.  No  one  can  show  more  sympathy  with 
enlarged  and  varied  ideas  of  human  happiness,  no 
one  has  connected  them  more  fearlessly  with  Christian 
principles,  or  claimed  from  those  principles  more 
unlimited  developments,  even  for  the  physical  well- 
being  of  men.  No  one  has  extended  wider  the  limits 
of  Christian   generosity,  forbearance,  and  tolerance. 


144  ECCE  HOMO  IX 

But,  on  the  other  hand,  what  is  striking  is,  that  ail 
this  is  compatible,  and  is  made  to  appear  so,  with  the 
most  profound  and  terrible  sense  of  evil,  with  in- 
dignation and  scorn  which  is  scathing  where  it  kindles 
and  strikes,  with  a  capacity  and  energy  of  deliberate 
religious  hatred  against  what  is  impure  and  false  and 
ungodly,  which  mark  one  who  has  dared  to  realise 
and  to  sympathise  with  the  wrath  of  Jesus  Christ. 

The  world  has  been  called  in  these  later  days, 
and  from  opposite  directions,  to  revise  its  judgments 
about  Jesus  Christ.  Christians,  on  the  one  hand, 
have  been  called  to  do  it  by  writers  of  whom  M. 
Ernest  Renan  is  the  most  remarkable  and  the  most 
unflinching.  But  the  sceptical  and  the  unbelieving 
have  likewise  been  obliged  to  change  their  ground 
and  their  tone,  and  no  one  with  any  self-respect  or 
care  for  his  credit  even  as  a  thinker  and  a  man  would 
like  to  repeat  the  superficial  and  shallow  flippancy 
and  irreligion  of  the  last  century.  Two  things  have 
been  specially  insisted  on.  We  have  been  told  that 
if  we  are  to  see  the  truth  of  things  as  it  is,  we  must 
disengage  our  minds  from  the  deeply  rooted  associa- 
tions and  conceptions  of  a  later  theology,  and  try  to 
form  our  impressions  first-hand  and  unprompted  from 
the  earliest  documents  which  we  can  reach.  It  has 
been  further  urged  on  us,  in  a  more  believing  spirit, 
that  we  should  follow  the  order  by  which  in  fact  truth 
was  unfolded,  and  rise  from  the  full  appreciation  of 
our  Lord's  human  nature  to  the  acknowledgment  of  His 
Divine  nature.     It  seems  to  us  that  the  writer  of  this 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  145 

book  has  felt  the  force  of  both  these  appeals,  and  that 
his  book  is  his  answer  to  them.  Here  is  the  way  in 
which  he  responds  to  both — to  the  latter  indirectly, 
but  with  a  significance  which  no  one  can  mistake ;  to 
the  former  directly  and  avowedly.  He  undertakes, 
isolating  himself  from  current  beliefs,  and  restricting 
himself  to  the  documents  from  which,  if  from  any 
source  at  all,  the  original  facts  about  Christ  are  to 
be  learned,  to  examine  what  the  genuine  impression 
is  which  an  attempt  to  realise  the  statements  about 
him  leaves  on  the  mind.  This  has  been  done  by 
others,  with  results  supposed  to  be  unfavourable  to 
Christianity.  He  has  been  plainly  moved  by  these 
results,  though  not  a  hint  is  given  of  the  existence  of 
Renan  or  Strauss.  But  the  effect  on  his  own  mind 
has  been  to  drive  him  back  on  a  closer  survey  of  the 
history  in  its  first  fountains,  and  to  bring  him  from  it 
filled  more  than  ever  with  wonder  at  its  astonishing 
phenomena,  to  protest  against  the  poverty  and  shallow- 
ness of  the  most  ambitious  and  confident  of  these 
attempts.  They  leave  the  historical  Character  which 
they  pourtray  still  unsounded,  its  motives,  objects,  and 
feelings  absolutely  incomprehensible.  He  accepts 
the  method  to  reverse  the  product.  "  Look  at  Christ 
historically,"  people  say  ;  "  see  Him  as  He  really  was." 
The  answer  here  is,  "Well,  I  will  look  at  Him  with 
whatever  aid  a  trained  historical  imagination  can  look 
at  Him.  I  accept  your  challenge ;  I  admit  your 
difficulties.  I  will  dare  to  do  what  you  do.  I  will 
try  and  look  at  the  very  facts  themselves,  with 
VOL.  II  L 


146  ECCE  HOMO 


IX 


singleness  and  'innocence  of  the  eye,'  trying  to  see 
nothing  more  than  I  really  see,  and  trying  to  see  all 
that  my  eye  falls  on.  I  will  try  to  realise  indeed  what 
is  recorded  of  Him.  And  this  is  what  I  see.  This 
is  the  irresistible  impression  from  the  plainest  and 
most  elementary  part  of  the  history,  if  we  are  to 
accept  any  history  at  all.  A  miracle  could  not  be 
more  unlike  the  order  of  our  experience  than  the 
Character  set  before  us  is  unique  and  unapproachable 
in  all  known  history.  Further,  all  that  makes  the 
superiority  of  the  modern  w^orld  to  the  ancient,  and  is 
most  permanent  and  pregnant  with  improvement  in 
it,  may  be  traced  to  the  appearance  of  that  Character, 
and  to  the  work  which  He  planned  and  did.  You  ask 
for  a  true  picture  of  Him,  drawn  w-ith  freedom,  drawn 
with  courage ;  here,  if  you  dare  look  at  it,  is  what 
those  who  wrote  of  Him  showed  Him  to  be.  Renan 
has  tried  to  draw  this  picture.  Take  the  Gospels  as 
they  stand  ;  treat  them  simply  as  biographies  ;  look, 
and  see,  and  think  of  what  they  tell,  and  then  ask 
yourself  about  Renan's  picture,  and  what  it  looks  like 
when  placed  side  by  side  with  the  truth." 

This,  as  we  have  ventured  to  express  it  in  our 
own  words,  seems  to  be  the  writer's  position.  It  is 
at  any  rate  the  effect  of  his  book,  to  our  minds.  The 
inquiry,  it  must  always  be  remembered,  is  a  pre- 
liminary one,  dealing,  as  he  says,  with  the  easiest  and 
obvious  elements  of  the  problem  ;  and  much  that 
seems  inadequate  and  unsatisfactory  may  be  developed 
hereafter.     He  starts  from  wliat,  to  those  who  already 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  147 

have  the  full  belief,  must  appear  a  low  level.  He 
takes,  as  it  will  be  seen,  the  documents  as  they  stand. 
He  takes  little  more  than  the  first  three  Gospels,  and 
these  as  a  whole,  without  asking  minute  questions 
about  them.  The  mythical  theory  he  dismisses  as 
false  to  nature,  in  dealing  with  such  a  Character  and 
such  results.  He  talks  in  his  preface  of  "  critically 
weighing  "  the  facts  ;  but  the  expression  is  misleading. 
It  is  true  that  we  may  talk  of  criticism  of  character  ;  but 
the  words  naturally  suggest  that  close  cross-questioning 
of  documents  and  details  which  has  produced  such 
remarkable  results  in  modern  investigations  ;  and  of 
this  there  is  none.  It  is  a  work  in  no  sense  of 
criticism  ;  it  is  a  work  of  what  he  calls  the  "  trained 
historical  imagination";  a  work  of  broad  and  deep 
knowledge  of  human  nature  and  the  world  it  works  in 
and  creates  about  it ;  a  work  of  steady  and  large 
insight  into  character,  and  practical  judgment  on 
moral  likelihoods.  He  answers  Strauss  as  he  answers 
Renan,  by  producing  the  interpretation  of  a  character, 
so  living,  so  in  accordance  with  all  before  and  after, 
that  it  overpowers  and  sweeps  away  objections ;  a 
picture,  an  analysis  or  outline,  if  he  pleases,  which 
justifies  itself  and  is  its  own  evidence,  by  its  originality 
and  internal  consistency.  Criticism  in  detail  does  not 
affect  him.  He  assumes  nothing  of  the  Gospels, 
except  that  they  are  records  ;  neither  their  inspiration 
in  any  theological  sense,  nor  their  authorship,  nor 
their  immunity  from  mistake,  nor  the  absolute  purity 
of  their  texts.     But  taking  them  as  a  whole  he  discerns 


148  ECCE  HOMO  IX 

in  them  a  Character  which,  if  you  accept  them  at  all 
and  on  any  terms,  you  cannot  mistake.  Even  if  the 
copy  is  ever  so  imperfect,  ever  so  unskilful,  ever  so 
blurred  and  defaced,  there  is  no  missing  the  features 
any  more  than  a  man  need  miss  the  principle  of  a 
pattern  because  it  is  rudely  or  confusedly  traced.  He 
looks  at  these  "  biographies  "  as  a  geologist  might  do 
at  a  disturbed  series  of  strata ;  and  he  feeds  his  eye 
upon  them  till  he  gets  such  a  view  of  the  coherent 
whole  as  will  stand  independent  of  the  right  or  wrong 
disposition  of  the  particular  fragments.  To  the  mind 
which  discerns  the  whole,  the  regulating  principle,  the 
general  curves  and  proportions  of  the  strata  may  be 
just  as  visible  after  the  disturbance  as  before  it.  The 
Gospels  bring  before  us  the  visible  and  distinct  outlines 
of  a  life  which,  after  all  efforts  to  alter  the  idea  of  it, 
remains  still  the  same  ;  they  present  certain  clusters 
of  leading  ideas  and  facts  so  embedded  in  their 
substance  that  no  criticism  of  detail  can  possibly  get 
rid  of  them,  without  absolutely  obliterating  the  whole 
record.  It  is  this  leading  idea,  or  cluster  of  ideas,  to 
be  gained  by  intent  gazing,  which  the  writer  disengages 
from  all  questions  of  criticism  in  the  narrow  sense  of 
the  word,  and  sets  before  us  as  explaining  the  history 
of  Christianity,  and  as  proving  themselves  by  that 
explanation.  That  the  world  has  been  moved  we 
know.  "Give  me,"  he  seems  to  say,  "the  Character 
which  is  set  forth  in  the  Gospels,  and  I  can  show  how 
He  moved  it  ": — 

It  is  in  the  object  of  the   present    treatise   to   exhibit 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  149 

Christ's  career  in  outline.  No  other  career  ever  had  so 
much  unity ;  no  other  biography  is  so  simple  or  can  so 
well  afford  to  dispense  with  details.  Men  in  general 
take  up  scheme  after  scheme,  as  circumstances  suggest 
one  or  another,  and  therefore  most  biographies  are  com- 
pelled to  pass  from  one  subject  to  another,  and  to  enter 
into  a  multitude  of  minute  questions,  to  divide  the  life 
carefully  into  periods  by  chronological  landmarks  accur- 
ately determined,  to  trace  the  gradual  development  of 
character  and  ripening  or  change  of  opinions.  But 
Christ  formed  one  plan  and  executed  it ;  no  important 
change  took  place  in  his  mode  of  thinking,  speaking,  or 
acting ;  at  least  the  evidence  before  us  does  not  enable 
us  to  trace  any  such  change.  It  is  possible,  indeed, 
for  students  of  his  life  to  find  details  which  they  may 
occupy  themselves  with  discussing  ;  they  may  map  out 
the  chronology  of  it,  and  devise  methods  of  harmonising 
the  different  accounts ;  but  such  details  are  of  little 
importance  compared  with  the  one  grand  question,  what 
v/as  Christ's  plan,  and  throw  scarcely  any  light  upon 
that  question.  What  was  Christ's  plan  is  the  main 
question  which  will  be  investigated  in  the  present 
treatise,  and  that  vision  of  universal  monarchy  which  we 
have  just  been  considering  affords  an  appropriate  intro- 
duction to  it.   .   .   . 

We  conclude  then,  that  Christ  in  describing  himself 
as  a  king,  and  at  the  same  time  as  king  of  the  Kingdom 
of  God — in  other  words  as  a  king  representing  the 
Majesty  of  the  Invisible  King  of  a  theocracy — claimed 
the  character  first  of  Founder,  next  of  Legislator;  thirdly, 
in  a  certain  high  and  peculiar  sense,  of  Judge,  of  a  new 
divine  society. 


150  ECCE  HOMO 


IX 


In  defining  as  above  the  position  which  Christ 
assumed,  we  have  not  entered  into  controvertible  matter. 
We  have  not  rested  upon  single  passages,  nor  drawn 
upon  the  fourth  Gospel.  To  deny  that  Christ  did 
undertake  to  found  and  to  legislate  for  a  new  theocratic 
society,  and  that  he  did  claim  the  office  of  Judge  of 
mankind,  is  indeed  possible,  but  only  to  those  who  alto- 
gether deny  the  credibility  of  the  extant  biographies  of 
Christ.  If  those  biographies  be  admitted  to  be  generally 
trustworthy,  then  Christ  undertook  to  be  w^hat  we  have 
described  ;  if  not,  then  of  course  this,  but  also  every 
other  account  of  him  falls  to  the  ground. 

We  have  said  that  he  starts  from  a  low  level ;  and 
he  restricts  himself  so  entirely  at  the  opening  to  facts 
which  do  not  involve  dispute,  that  his  views  of  them 
are  necessarily  incomplete,  and,  so  to  say,  provisional 
and  deliberate  understatements.  He  begins  no  higher 
than  the  beginning  of  the  public  ministry,  the  Baptism, 
and  the  Temptation ;  and  his  account  of  these  leaves 
much  to  say,  though  it  suggests  much  of  what  is  left 
unsaid.  But  he  soon  gets  to  the  proper  subject  of 
his  book — the  absolute  uniqueness  of  Him  whose 
equally  unique  work  has  been  the  Christian  Church. 
And  this  uniqueness  he  finds  in  the  combination  of 
"  unbounded  personal  pretensions,"  and  the  possession, 
claimed  and  believed,  of  boundless  power,  with  an 
absolutely  unearthly  use  of  His  pretensions  and  His 
power,  and  with  a  goodness  which  has  proved  to  be, 
and  still  is,  the  permanent  and  ever-flowing  source  of 
moral  elevation  and  improvement  in  the  world.     He 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  151 

early  comes  across  the  question  of  miracles,  and,  as 
he  says,  it  is  impossible  to  separate  the  claim  to  them 
and  the  belief  in  them  from  the  story.  We  find 
Christ,  he  says,  "describing  himself  as  a  king,  and 
at  the  same  time  as  king  of  the  Kingdom  of  God  " ; 
calling  forth  and  founding  a  new  and  divine  society, 
and  claiming  to  be,  both  now  and  hereafter,  the  Judge 
without  appeal  of  all  mankind;  "he  considered,  in 
short,  heaven  and  hell  to  be  in  his  hands."  And  we 
find,  on  the  other  hand,  that  as  such  He  has  been 
received.  To  such  an  astonishing  chain  of  pheno- 
mena miracles  naturally  belong  : — 

When  we  contemplate  this  scheme  as  a  whole,  and 
glance  at  the  execution  and  results  of  it,  three  things 
strike  us  with  astonishment.  First,  its  prodigious  origin- 
ality, if  the  expression  may  be  used.  What  other  man 
has  had  the  courage  or  elevation  of  mind  to  say,  "  I  will 
build  up  a  state  by  the  mere  force  of  my  will,  without 
help  from  the  kings  of  the  world,  without  taking  advantage 
of  any  of  the  secondary  causes  which  unite  men  together 
— unity  of  interest  or  speech,  or  blood-relationship.  I 
will  make  laws  for  my  state  which  shall  never  be  repealed, 
and  I  will  defy  all  the  powers  of  destruction  that  are  at 
work  in  the  world  to  destroy  what  I  build  "  ? 

Secondly,  we  are  astonished  at  the  calm  confidence 
with  which  the  scheme  was  carried  out.  The  reason 
why  statesmen  can  seldom  work  on  this  vast  scale  is 
that  it  commonly  requires  a  whole  lifetime  to  gain  that 
ascendency  over  their  fellow-men  which  such  schemes 
presuppose.       Some   of   the   leading  organisers   of   the 


152  ECCE  HOMO  ix 

world  have  said,  "  I  will  work  my  way  to  supreme  power, 
and  then  I  will  execute  great  plans."  But  Christ  over- 
leaped the  first  stage  altogether.  He  did  not  work  his 
way  to  royalty,  but  simply  said  to  all  men,  "  I  am  your 
king."  He  did  not  struggle  forward  to  a  position  in 
which  he  could  found  a  new  state,  but  simply  founded  it. 

Thirdly,  we  are  astonished  at  the  prodigious  success 
of  the  scheme.  It  is  not  more  certain  that  Christ  pre- 
sented himself  to  men  as  the  founder,  legislator,  and 
judge  of  a  divine  society  than  it  is  certain  that  men 
have  accepted  him  in  these  characters,  that  the  divine 
society  has  been  founded,  that  it  has  lasted  nearly  two 
thousand  years,  that  it  has  extended  over  a  large  and 
the  most  highly-civilised  portion  of  the  earth's  surface, 
and  that  it  continues  full  of  vigour  at  the  present  day. 

Between  the  astonishing  design  and  its  astonishing 
success  there  intervenes  an  astonishing  instrumentality — 
that  of  miracles.  It  will  be  thought  by  some  that  in 
asserting  miracles  to  have  been  actually  wrought  by 
Christ  we  go  beyond  what  the  evidence,  perhaps  beyond 
what  any  possible  evidence,  is  able  to  sustain.  Waiving, 
then,  for  the  present,  the  question  whether  miracles  were 
actually  wrought,  we  may  state  a  fact  which  is  fully 
capable  of  being  established  by  ordinary  evidence,  and 
which  is  actually  established  by  evidence  as  ample  as 
any  historical  fact  whatever  —  the  fact,  namely,  that 
Christ  professed  to  work  miracles.  We  may  go  further, 
and  assert  with  confidence  that  Christ  was  believed  by 
his  followers  really  to  work  miracles,  and  that  it  was 
mainly  on  this  account  that  they  conceded  to  him  the 
pre-eminent  dignity  and  authority  which  he  claimed. 
The  accounts  which  we  have  of  these  miracles   may  be 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  153 

exaggerated  ;  it  is  possible  that  in  some  special  cases 
stories  have  been  related  which  have  no  foundation 
whatever ;  but  on  the  whole,  miracles  play  so  important 
a  part  in  Christ's  scheme,  that  any  theory  which  would 
represent  them  as  due  entirely  to  the  imagination  of  his 
followers  or  of  a  later  age  destroys  the  credibility  of  the 
documents  not  partially  but  wholly,  and  leaves  Christ  a 
personage  as  mythical  as  Hercules.  Now,  the  present 
treatise  aims  to  show  that  the  Christ  of  the  Gospels  is 
not  mythical,  by  showing  that  the  character  those 
biographies  portray  is  in  all  its  large  features  strikingly 
consistent,  and  at  the  same  time  so  peculiar  as  to  be 
altogether  beyond  the  reach  of  invention  both  by  indi- 
vidual genius  and  still  more  by  what  is  called  the  "  con- 
sciousness of  an  age."  Now,  if  the  character  depicted 
in  the  Gospels  is  in  the  main  real  and  historical,  they 
must  be  generally  trustworthy,  and  if  so,  the  responsi- 
bility of  miracles  is  fixed  on  Christ.  In  this  case  the 
reality  of  the  miracles  themselves  depends  in  a  great 
degree  on  the  opinion  we  form  of  Christ's  veracity,  and 
this  opinion  must  arise  gradually  from  the  careful 
examination  of  his  whole  life.  For  our  present  purpose, 
which  is  to  investigate  the  plan  which  Christ  formed  and 
the  way  in  which  he  executed  it,  it  matters  nothing 
whether  the  miracles  were  real  or  imaginary  ;  in  either 
case,  being  believed  to  be  real,  they  had  the  same  effect. 
Provisionally,  therefore,  we  may  speak  of  them  as  real. 

Without  the   belief  in  miracles,  as  he  says,  it  is 
impossible  to  conceive  the  history  of  the  Church  : — 

If  we  suppose  that  Christ  really  performed  no  miracles, 
and   that  those  which  are  attributed  to  him  were  the 


154  ECCE  HOMO 


IX 


product  of  self-deception  mixed  in  some  proportion  or 
other  with  imposture,  then  no  doubt  the  faith  of  St.  Paul 
and  St.  John  was  an  empty  chimera,  a  mere  misconcep- 
tion ;  but  it  is  none  the  less  true  that  those  apparent 
miracles  were  essential  to  Christ's  success,  and  that  had 
he  not  pretended  to  perform  them  the  Christian  Church 
would  never  have  been  founded,  and  the  name  of  Jesus 
of  Nazareth  would  be  known  at  this  day  only  to  the 
curious  in  Jewish  antiquities. 

But  he  goes  on  to  point  out  what  was  the  use 
which  Christ  made  of  miracles,  and  how  it  was  that 
they  did  not,  as  they  might  have  done,  even  impede 
His  purpose  of  founding  His  kingdom  on  men's  con- 
sciences and  not  on  their  terrors.  In  one  of  the 
most  remarkable  passages  perhaps  ever  written  on  the 
Gospel  miracles  as  they  are  seen  when  simply  looked 
at  as  they  are  described,  the  writer  says  : — 

He  imposed  upon  himself  a  strict  restraint  in  the 
use  of  his  supernatural  powers.  He  adopted  the  prin- 
ciple that  he  was  not  sent  to  destroy  men's  lives  but  to 
save  them,  and  rigidly  abstained  in  practice  from  inflict- 
ing any  kind  of  damage  or  harm.  In  this  course  he 
persevered  so  steadily  that  it  became  generally  under- 
stood. Every  one  knew  that  this  king^  whose  royal  pre- 
tensions were  so  prominent,  had  an  absolutely  unlimited 
patience,  and  that  he  would  endure  the  keenest  criticism, 
the  bitterest  and  most  malignant  personal  attacks. 
Men's  mouths  were  open  to  discuss  his  claims  and 
character  with  perfect  freedom  ;  so  far  from  regarding 
him  with  that  excessive  fear  which  might  have  prevented 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  155 

them  from  receiving  his  doctrine  intelligently,  they  learnt 
gradually  to  treat  him,  even  while  they  acknowledged 
his  extraordinary  power,  with  a  reckless  animosity  which 
they  would  have  been  afraid  to  show  towards  an  ordinary 
enemy.  With  curious  inconsistency  they  openly  charged 
him  with  being  leagued  with  the  devil ;  in  other  words, 
they  acknowledged  that  he  was  capable  of  boundless 
mischief,  and  yet  they  were  so  little  afraid  of  him  that 
they  were  ready  to  provoke  him  to  use  his  whole  power 
against  themselves.  The  truth  was  that  they  believed 
him  to  be  disarmed  by  his  own  deliberate  resolution, 
and  they  judged  rightly.  He  punished  their  malice  only 
by  verbal  reproofs,  and  they  gradually  gathered  courage 
to  attack  the  life  of  one  whose  miraculous  powers  they 
did  not  question. 

Meantime,  while  this  magnanimous  self-restraint  saved 
him  from  false  friends  and  mercenary  or  servile  flatterers, 
and  saved  the  kingdom  which  he  founded  from  the 
corruption  of  self-interest  and  worldliness,  it  gave  him  a 
power  over  the  good  such  as  nothing  else  could  have 
given.  For  the  noblest  and  most  amiable  thing  that 
can  be  seen  is  power  mixed  with  gentleness,  the  reposing, 
self- restraining  attitude  of  strength.  These  are  the 
"  fine  strains  of  honour,"  these  are  "  the  graces  of  the 
gods " — 

To  tear  with  thunder  the  wide  cheeks  o'  the  air, 
And  yet  to  charge  the  sulphur  with  a  bolt 
That  shall  but  rive  an  oak. 

And  while  he  did  no  mischief  under  any  provocation, 
his  power  flowed  in  acts  of  beneficence  on  every  side. 
Men  could  approach  near  to  him,  could  eat  and  drink 


156  ECCE  HOMO 


IX 


with  him,  could  listen  to  his  talk  and  ask  him  questions^ 
and  they  found  him  not  accessible  only,  but  warm- 
hearted, and  not  occupied  so  much  with  his  own  plans 
that  he  could  not  attend  to  a  case  of  distress  or  mental 
perplexity.  They  found  him  full  of  sympathy  and 
appreciation,  dropping  words  of  praise,  ejaculations  of 
admiration,  tears.  He  surrounded  himself  with  those 
who  had  tasted  of  his  bounty,  sick  people  whom  he  had 
cured,  lepers  whose  death -in -life,  demoniacs  whose  hell- 
in-life,  he  had  terminated  with  a  single  powerful  word. 
Among  these  came  loving  hearts  who  thanked  him  for 
friends  and  relatives  rescued  for  them  out  of  the  jaws  of 
premature  death,  and  others  whom  he  had  saved,  by 
a  power  which  did  not  seem  different,  from  vice  and 
degradation. 

This  temperance  in  the  use  of  supernatural  power  is 
the  masterpiece  of  Christ.  It  is  a  moral  miracle  super- 
induced upon  a  physical  one.  This  repose  in  greatness 
makes  him  surely  the  most  sublime  image  ever  offered 
to  the  human  imagination.  And  it  is  precisely  this  trait 
which  gave  him  his  immense  and  immediate  ascendency 
over  men.  If  the  question  be  put — Why  was  Christ  so 
successful  ? — Why  did  men  gather  round  him  at  his  call, 
form  themselves  into  a  new  society  according  to  his  wish, 
and  accept  him  with  unbounded  devotion  as  their  legis- 
lator and  judge  ?  some  will  answer,  Because  of  the 
miracles  which  attested  his  divine  character ;  others. 
Because  of  the  intrinsic  beauty  and  divinity  of  the  great 
law  of  love  which  he  propounded.  But  miracles,  as  we 
have  seen,  have  not  by  themselves  this  persuasive  power. 
That  a  man  possesses  a  strange  power  which  I  cannot 
understand  is  no  reason  why  I  should  receive  his  words 
as  divine  oracles  of  truth.      The  powerful  man  is  not  of 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  157 

necessity  also  wise  ;  his  power  may  terrify  and  yet  not 
convince.  On  the  other  hand,  the  law  of  love,  however 
divine,  was  but  a  precept.  Undoubtedly  it  deserved 
that  men  should  accept  it  for  its  intrinsic  worth,  but  men 
are  not  commonly  so  eager  to  receive  the  words  of  wise 
men  nor  so  unbounded  in  their  gratitude  to  them.  It 
was  neither  for  his  miracles  nor  for  the  beauty  of  his 
doctrine  that  Christ  was  worshipped.  Nor  was  it  for 
his  winning  personal  character,  nor  for  the  persecutions 
he  endured,  nor  for  his  martyrdom.  It  was  for  the 
inimitable  unity  which  all  these  things  made  when  taken 
together.  In  other  words,  it  was  for  this  that  he  whose 
power  and  greatness  as  shown  in  his  miracles  were  over- 
whelming denied  himself  the  use  of  his  power,  treated  it 
as  a  slight  thing,  walked  among  men  as  though  he  were 
one  of  them,  relieved  them  in  distress,  taught  them  to 
love  each  other,  bore  with  undisturbed  patience  a  per- 
petual hailstorm  of  calumny ;  and  when  his  enemies 
grew  fiercer,  continued  still  to  endure  their  attacks  in 
silence,  until,  petrified  and  bewildered  with  astonishment, 
men  saw  him  arrested  and  put  to  death  with  torture, 
refusing  steadfastly  to  use  in  his  own  behalf  the  power  he 
conceived  he  held  for  the  benefit  of  others.  It  was  the 
combination  of  greatness  and  self-sacrifice  which  won 
their  hearts,  the  mighty  powers  held  under  a  mighty 
control,  the  unspeakable  condescension,  the  Cross  of 
Christ. 

And  he  goes  on  to  describe  the  effect  upon  the 
world;  and  what  it  was  that  "drew  all  men  unto 
Him  "  :— 

To  sum  up  the  results  of  this  chapter.     We  began 


158  ECCE  HOMO  ix 

by  remarking  that  an  astonishing  plan  met  with  an 
astonishing  success,  and  we  raised  the  question  to  what 
instrumentaHty  that  success  was  due.  Christ  announced 
himself  as  the  Founder  and  Legislator  of  a  new  Society, 
and  as  the  Supreme  Judge  of  men.  Now  by  what  means 
did  he  procure  that  these  immense  pretensions  should 
be  allowed  ?  He  might  have  done  it  by  sheer  power, 
he  might  have  adopted  persuasion,  and  pointed  out  the 
merits  of  the  scheme  and  of  the  legislation  he  proposed 
to  introduce.  But  he  adopted  a  third  plan,  which  had 
the  effect  not  merely  of  securing  obedience,  but  of  excit- 
ing enthusiasm  and  devotion.  He  laid  men  under  an 
immense  obligation.  He  convinced  them  that  he  was 
a  person  of  altogether  transcendent  greatness,  one  who 
needed  nothing  at  their  hands,  one  whom  it  was  im- 
possible to  benefit  by  conferring  riches,  or  fame,  or 
dominion  upon  him,  and  that,  being  so  great,  he  had 
devoted  himself  of  mere  benevolence  to  their  good.  He 
showed  them  that  for  their  sakes  he  lived  a  hard  and 
laborious  life,  and  exposed  himself  to  the  utmost  malice 
of  powerful  men.  They  saw  him  hungry,  though  they 
believed  him  able  to  turn  the  stones  into  bread  ;  they 
saw  his  royal  pretensions  spurned,  though  they  believed 
that  he  could  in  a  moment  take  into  his  hand  all  the 
kingdoms  of  the  world  and  the  glory  of  them  ;  they  saw 
his  life  in  danger  ;  they  saw  him  at  last  expire  in  agonies, 
though  they  believed  that,  had  he  so  willed  it,  no  danger 
could  harm  him,  and  that  had  he  thrown  himself  from 
the  topmost  pinnacle  of  the  temple  he  would  have  been 
softly  received  in  the  arms  of  ministering  angels.  Wit- 
nessing his  sufferings,  and  convinced  by  the  miracles 
they  saw  him  work  that  they  were  voluntarily  endured, 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  159 

men's  hearts  were  touched,  and  pity  for  weakness  blend- 
ing strangely  with  wondering  admiration  of  unlimited 
power,  an  agitation  of  gratitude,  sympathy,  and  astonish- 
ment, such  as  nothing  else  could  ever  excite,  sprang  up 
in  them  ;  and  when,  turning  from  his  deeds  to  his  words, 
they  found  this  very  self-denial  which  had  guided  his 
own  life  prescribed  as  the  principle  which  should  guide 
theirs,  gratitude  broke  forth  in  joyful  obedience,  self- 
denial  produced  self-denial,  and  the  Law  and  Lawgiver 
together  were  enshrined  in  their  inmost  hearts  for 
inseparable  veneration. 

It  is  plain  that  whatever  there  is  novel  in  such  a 
line  of  argument  must  depend  upon  the  way  in  which 
it  is  handled ;  and  it  is  the  extraordinary  and  sustained 
power  wuth  which  this  is  done  which  gives  its  character 
to  the  book.  The  writer's  method  consists  in  realis- 
ing with  a  depth  of  feeling  and  thought  which  it  would 
not  be  easy  to  match,  what  our  Lord  was  in  His 
human  ministry,  as  that  ministry  is  set  before  us  by 
those  who  witnessed  it ;  and  next,  in  showing  in  detail 
the  connection  of  that  ministry,  which  wrought  so 
much  by  teaching,  but  still  more  by  the  Divine 
example,  "not  sparing  words  but  resting  most  on 
deeds,"  with  all  that  is  highest,  purest,  and  best  in 
the  morality  of  Christendom,  and  with  what  is  most 
fruitful  and  most  hopeful  in  the  differences  between 
the  old  world  and  our  own.  We  cannot  think  we  are 
wrong  when  we  say  that  no  one  could  speak  of  our 
Lord  as  this  writer  speaks,  with  the  enthusiasm,  the 
overwhelming  sense  of  His  inexpressible  authority,  of 


IGO  ECCE  HOMO  IX 

His  unapproachable  perfection,  with  the  profound  faith 
which  lays  everything  at  His  feet,  and  not  also  believe 
all  that  the  Divine  Society  which  Christ  founded  has 
believed  about  Him.  And  though  for  the  present  his 
subject  is  history,  and  human  morality  as  it  appears 
to  have  been  revolutionised  and  finally  fixed  by  that 
history,  and  not  the  theology  which  subsequent  in 
date  is  yet  the  foundation  of  both,  it  is  difficult  to 
imagine  any  reader  going  along  with  him  and  not 
breaking  out  at  length  into  the  burst,  "  My  Lord  and 
my  God."  If  it  is  not  so,  then  the  phenomenon  is 
strange  indeed ;  for  a  belief  below  the  highest  and 
truest  has  produced  an  appreciation,  a  reverence,  an 
adoration  which  the  highest  belief  has  only  produced 
in  the  choicest  examples  of  those  who  have  had  it,  and 
by  the  side  of  which  the  ordinary  exhibitions  of  the 
divine  history  are  pale  and  feeble.  To  few,  indeed, 
as  it  seems  to  us,  has  it  been  given  to  feel,  and  to 
make  others  feel,  what  in  all  the  marvellous  complexity 
of  high  and  low,  and  in  all  the  Divine  singleness  of 
His  goodness  and  power,  the  Son  of  Man  appeared  in 
the  days  of  His  flesh.  It  is  not  more  vivid  or  more 
wonderful  than  what  the  Gospels  with  so  much  detail 
tell  us  of  that  awful  ministry  in  real  flesh  and  blood, 
with  a  human  soul  and  with  all  the  reality  of  man's 
nature;  but  most  of  us,  after  all,  read  the  Gospels  with 
sealed  and  unwondering  eyes.  But,  dwelling  on  the 
Manhood,  so  as  almost  to  overpower  us  with  the  con- 
trast between  the  distinct  and  living  truth  and  the  dead 
and  dull  familiarity  of  our  thoughts  of  routine  and 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  161 

custom,  he  does  so  in  such  a  way  that  it  is  impossible 
to  doubt,  though  the  word  Incarnation  never  occurs 
in  the  volume,  that  all  the  while  he  has  before  his 
thoughts  the  "taking  of  the  manhood  into  God." 
What  is  the  Gospel  picture  ? 

And  let  us  pause  once  more  to  consider  that  which 
remains  throughout  a  subject  of  ever-recurring  astonish- 
ment, the  unbounded  personal  pretensions  which  Christ 
advances.  It  is  common  in  human  history  to  meet  with 
those  who  claim  some  superiority  over  their  fellows. 
Men  assert  a  pre-eminence  over  their  fellow-citizens  or 
fellow-countrymen  and  become  rulers  of  those  who  at 
first  were  their  equals,  but  they  dream  of  nothing  greater 
than  some  partial  control  over  the  actions  of  others  for 
the  short  space  of  a  lifetime.  Few  indeed  are  those  to 
whom  it  is  given  to  influence  future  ages.  Yet  some 
men  have  appeared  who  have  been  "as  levers  to  uplift 
the  earth  and  roll  it  in  another  course."  Homer  by 
creating  literature,  Socrates  by  creating  science,  Caesar 
by  carrying  civilisation  inland  from  the  shores  of  the 
Mediterranean,  Newton  by  starting  science  upon  a  career 
of  steady  progress,  may  be  said  to  have  attained  this 
eminence.  But  these  men  gave  a  single  impact  like 
that  which  is  conceived  to  have  first  set  the  planets  in 
motion  ;  Christ  claims  to  be  a  perpetual  attractive  power 
like  the  sun  which  determines  their  orbit.  They  con- 
tributed to  men  some  discovery  and  passed  away  ; 
Christ's  discovery  is  himself.  To  humanity  struggling 
with  its  passions  and  its  destiny  he  says.  Cling  to  me, 
cling  ever  closer  to  me.  If  we  believe  St.  John,  he  repre 
sented  himself  as  the  Light  of  the  world,  as  the  Shepherd 

VOL.  II  M 


162  -ECCE  HOMO  ix 

of  the  souls  of  men,  as  the  Way  to  immortality,  as  the 
Vine  or  Life -tree  of  humanity.  And  if  we  refuse  to 
believe  that  he  used  those  words,  we  cannot  deny,  with- 
out rejecting  all  the  evidence  before  us,  that  he  used 
words  which  have  substantially  the  same  meaning.  We 
cannot  deny  that  he  commanded  men  to  leave  everything 
and  attach  themselves  to  him  ;  that  he  declared  himself 
king,  master,  and  judge  of  men  ;  that  he  promised  to 
give  rest  to  all  the  wear>'  and  heavy-laden  ;  that  he 
instructed  his  followers  to  hope  for  life  from  feeding  on 
his  body  and  blood. 

But  it  is  doubly  surprising  to  observe  that  these 
enormous  pretensions  were  advanced  by  one  whose 
special  peculiarity,  not  only  among  his  contemporaries 
but  among  the  remarkable  men  that  have  appeared 
before  and  since,  was  an  almost  feminine  tenderness  and 
humility.  This  characteristic  was  remarked,  as  we  have 
seen,  by  the  Baptist,  and  Christ  himself  was  fully  con- 
scious of  it.  Yet  so  clear  to  him  was  his  own  dignity 
and  infinite  importance  to  the  human  race  as  an  objec- 
tive fact  with  which  his  own  opinion  of  himself  had 
nothing  to  do,  that  in  the  same  breath  in  which  he 
asserts  it  in  the  most  unmeasured  language,  he  alludes, 
apparently  with  entire  unconsciousness,  to  his  humility. 
"  Take  my  yoke  upon  you,  and  learn  of  me  ;  for  I  am 
meek  ajtd  lowly  of  heart."  And  again,  when  speaking 
to  his  followers  of  the  arrogance  of  the  Pharisees,  he 
says,  "  They  love  to  be  called  Rabbi  ;  but  be  not  you 
called  Rabbi  :  for  one  is  your  master^  even  Christ." 

Who  is  the  humble  man  ?  It  is  he  who  resists  with 
special  watchfulness  and  success  the  temptations  which 
the  conditions  of  his  life  may  offer  to  exaggei-ate  his  own 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  163 

importance.  ...  If  he  judged  himself  correctly,  and  if 
the  Baptist  described  him  well  when  he  compared  him 
to  a  lamb,  and,  we  may  add,  if  his  biographers  have 
delineated  his  character  faithfully,  Christ  was  one  naturally 
contented  with  obscurity,  wanting  the  restless  desire  for 
distinction  and  eminence  which  is  common  in  great 
men,  hating  to  put  forward  personal  claims,  disliking 
competition  and  "disputes  who  should  be  greatest," 
finding  something  bombastic  in  the  titles  of  royalty,  fond 
of  what  is  simple  and  homely,  of  children,  of  poor  people, 
occupying  himself  so  much  with  the  concerns  of  others, 
with  the  relief  of  sickness  and  want,  that  the  temptation 
to  exaggerate  the  importance  of  his  own  thoughts  and 
plans  was  not  likely  to  master  him  ;  lastly,  entertaining 
for  the  human  race  a  feeling  so  singularly  fraternal  that 
he  was  likely  to  reject  as  a  sort  of  treason  the  impulse 
to  set  himself  in  any  manner  above  them.  Christ,  it 
appears,  was  this  humble  man.  When  we  have  fully 
pondered  the  fact  we  may  be  in  a  condition  to  estimate 
the  force  of  the  evidence  which,  submitted  to  his  mind, 
could  induce  him,  in  direct  opposition  to  all  his  tastes 
and  instincts,  to  lay  claim,  persistently,  with  the  calmness 
of  entire  conviction,  in  opposition  to  the  whole  religious 
world,  in  spite  of  the  offence  which  his  own  followers 
conceived,  to  a  dominion  more  transcendent,  more 
universal,  more  complete,  than  the  most  delirious  votary 
of  glory  ever  aspired  to  in  his  dreams. 

And  what  is  it  that  our  Lord  has  done  for  man  by 
being  so  truly  man  ? 

This  then  it  is  which  is  wanted  to  raise  the  feeling 
of  humanity  into  an  enthusiasm  ;  when  the  precept  of 


164  ECCE  HOMO  ix 

love  has  been  given,  an  image  must  be  set  before  the 
eyes  of  those  who  are  called  upon  to  obey  it,  an  ideal  or 
type  of  man  which  may  be  noble  and  amiable  enough  to 
raise  the  whole  race  and  make  the  meanest  member  of  it 
sacred  with  reflected  glory. 

Did  not  Christ  do  this  ?  Did  the  command  to  love 
go  forth  to  those  who  had  never  seen  a  human  being  they 
could  revere  ?  Could  his  followers  turn  upon  him  and 
say,  How  can  we  love  a  creature  so  degraded,  full  of 
vile  wants  and  contemptible  passions,  whose  little  life 
is  most  harmlessly  spent  when  it  is  an  empty  round  of 
eating  and  sleeping  ;  a  creature  destined  for  the  grave 
and  for  oblivion  when  his  allotted  term  of  fretfulness  and 
folly  has  expired  ?  Of  this  race  Christ  himself  was  a 
member,  and  to  this  day  is  it  not  the  best  answer  to  all 
blasphemers  of  the  species,  the  best  consolation  when 
our  sense  of  its  degradation  is  keenest,  that  a  human 
brain  was  behind  his  forehead,  and  a  human  heart 
beating  in  his  breast,  and  that  within  the  whole  creation 
of  God  nothing  more  elevated  or  more  attractive  has  yet 
been  found  than  he  ?  And  if  it  be  answered  that  there 
was  in  his  nature  something  exceptional  and  peculiar, 
that  humanity  must  not  be  measured  by  the  stature  of 
Christ,  let  us  remember  that  it  was  precisely  thus  that  he 
wished  it  to  be  measured,  delighting  to  call  himself  the 
Son  of  Man,  delighting  to  call  the  meanest  of  mankind 
his  brothers.  If  some  human  beings  are  abject  and 
contemptible,  if  it  be  incredible  to  us  that  they  can  have 
any  high  dignity  or  destiny,  do  we  regard  them  from  so 
great  a  height  as  Christ  ?  Are  we  likely  to  be  more 
pained  by  their  faults  and  deficiencies  than  he  was  ?  Is 
our  standard  higher  than  his  ?     And  yet  he   associated 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  165 

by  preference  with  the  meanest  of  the  race  ;  no  contempt 
for  them  did  he  ever  express,  no  suspicion  that  they 
might  be  less  dear  than  the  best  and  wisest  to  the 
common  Father,  no  doubt  that  they  were  naturally 
capable  of  rising  to  a  moral  elevation  like  his  own. 
There  is  nothing  of  which  a  man  may  be  prouder  than 
of  this  ;  it  is  the  most  hopeful  and  redeeming  fact  in 
history  ;  it  is  precisely  what  was  wanting  to  raise  the 
love  of  man  as  man  to  enthusiasm.  An  eternal  glory 
has  been  shed  upon  the  human  race  by  the  love  Christ 
bore  to  it.  And  it  was  because  the  Edict  of  Universal 
Love  went  forth  to  men  whose  hearts  were  in  no  cynical 
mood,  but  possessed  with  a, spirit  of  devotion  to  a  man, 
that  words  which  at  any  other  time,  however  grandly 
they  might  sound,  would  have  been  but  words,  penetrated 
so  deeply,  and  along  with  the  law  of  love  the  power  of 
love  was  given.  Therefore  also  the  first  Christians  were 
enabled  to  dispense  with  philosophical  phrases,  and 
instead  of  saying  that  they  loved  the  ideal  of  man  in 
man,  could  simply  say  and  feel  that  they  loved  Christ  in 
every  man. 

We  have  here  the  very  kernel  of  the  Christian 
moral  scheme.  We  have  distinctly  before  us  the  end 
Christ  proposed  to  himself,  and  the  means  he  considered 
adequate  to  the  attainment  of  it.   .   .   . 

But  how  to  give  to  the  meagre  and  narrow  hearts 
of  men  such  enlargement?  How  to  make  them  capable 
of  a  universal  sympathy  ?  Christ  believed  it  possible  to 
bind  men  to  their  kind,  but  on  one  condition — that  they 
were  first  bound  fast  to  himself.  He  stood  forth  as  the 
representative  of  men,  he  identified  himself  with  the 
cause  and  with  the  interests  of  all  human  beings  ;  he 


166  ECCE  HOMO  ix 

was  destined,  as  he  began  before  long  obscurely  to 
intimate,  to  lay  down  his  life  for  them.  Few  of  us 
sympathise  originally  and  directly  with  this  devotion  ; 
few  of  us  can  perceive  in  human  nature  itself  any  merit 
sufficient  to  evoke  it.  But  it  is  not  so  hard  to  love 
and  venerate  him  who  felt  it.  So  vast  a  passion  of 
love,  a  devotion  so  comprehensive,  elevated,  deliberate, 
and  profound,  has  not  elsewhere  been  in  any  degree 
approached  save  by  some  of  his  imitators.  And  as  love 
provokes  love,  many  have  found  it  possible  to  conceive 
for  Christ  an  attachment  the  closeness  of  w^hich  no  words 
can  describe,  a  veneration  so  possessing  and  absorbing 
the  man  within  them,  that  they  have  said,  "  I  live  no 
more,  but  Christ  lives  in  me." 

And  what,  in  fact,  has  been  the  result,  after  the 
utmost  and  freest  abatement  for  the  objections  of 
those  who  criticise  the  philosophical  theories  or  the 
practical  effects  of  Christianity  ? 

But  that  Christ's  method,  when  rightly  applied,  is 
really  of  mighty  force  may  be  shown  by  an  argument 
which  the  severest  censor  of  Christians  will  hardly  refuse 
to  admit.  Compare  the  ancient  with  the  modern  world  : 
"  Look  on  this  picture  and  on  that."  The  broad  distinction 
in  the  characters  of  men  forces  itself  into  prominence. 
Among  all  the  men  of  the  ancient  heathen  world  there 
were  scarcely  one  or  two  to  whom  we  might  venture  to 
apply  the  epithet  "  holy."  In  other  words,  there  were  not 
more  than  one  or  two,  if  any,  who,  besides  being  virtuous 
in  their  actions,  were  possessed  with  an  unaffected 
enthusiasm   of  goodness,   and   besides   abstaining   from 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  167 

vice,  regarded  even  a  vicious  thought  with  horror. 
Probably  no  one  will  deny  that  in  Christian  countries 
this  higher-toned  goodness,  which  we  call  holiness,  has 
existed.  Few  will  maintain  that  it  has  been  exceedingly 
rare.  Perhaps  the  truth  is  that  there  has  scarcely  been 
a  town  in  any  Christian  country  since  the  time  of  Christ, 
where  a  century  has  passed  without  exhibiting  a  character 
of  such  elevation  that  his  mere  presence  has  shamed  the 
bad  and  made  the  good  better,  and  has  been  felt  at  times 
like  the  presence  of  God  Himself.  And  if  this  be  so,  has 
Christ  failed  ?  or  can  Christianity  die  ? 

The  principle  of  feeling  and  action  which  Christ 
implanted  in  that  Divine  Society  which  He  founded, 
or  in  other  words,  His  morality,  had  two  peculiarities  ; 
it  sprang,  and  it  must  spring  still,  from  what  this 
writer  calls  all  through  an  "  enthusiasm  " ;  and  this 
enthusiasm  was  kindled  and  maintained  by  the  in- 
fluence of  a  Person.  There  can  be  no  goodness 
without  impulses  to  goodness,  any  more  than  these 
impulses  are  enough  without  being  directed  by  truth 
and  reason  ;  but  the  impulses  must  come  before  the 
guidance,  and  "Christ's  Theocracy"  is  described  "as  a 
great  attempt  to  set  all  the  virtues  of  the  world  on  this 
basis,  and  to  give  it  a  visible  centre  and  fountain." 
He  thus  describes  how  personal  influence  is  the  great 
instrument  of  moral  quickening  and  elevation  : — 

How  do  men  become  for  the  most  part  "  pure,  gener- 
ous, and  humane  "  ?  By  personal,  not  by  logical  influ- 
ences. They  have  been  reared  by  parents  who  had  these 
qualities,  they  have  lived  in  a  society  which  had  a  high 


168  ECCE  HOMO 


IX 


tone,  they  have  been  accustomed  to  see  just  acts  done, 
to  hear  gentle  words  spoken,  and  the  justness  and 
the  gentleness  have  passed  into  their  hearts,  and  slowly 
moulded  their  habits  and  made  their  moral  discernment 
clear  ;  they  remember  commands  and  prohibitions  which 
it  is  a  pleasure  to  obey  for  the  sake  of  those  who  gave 
them  ;  often  they  think  of  those  who  may  be  dead  and 
say,  "  How  would  this  action  appear  to  him  ?  Would 
he  approve  that  word  or  disapprove  it  ? "  To  such  no 
baseness  appears  a  small  baseness  because  its  con- 
sequences may  be  small,  nor  does  the  yoke  of  law  seem 
burdensome  although  it  is  ever  on  their  necks,  nor  do 
they  dream  of  covering  a  sin  by  an  atoning  act  of  virtue. 
Often  in  solitude  they  blush  when  some  impure  fancy 
sails  across  the  clear  heaven  of  their  minds,  because  they 
are  never  alone,  because  the  absent  Examples,  the 
Authorities  they  still  revere,  rule  not  their  actions  only 
but  their  inmost  hearts  ;  because  their  conscience  is 
indeed  awake  and  alive,  representing  all  the  nobleness 
with  which  they  stand  in  sympathy,  and  reporting  their 
most  hidden  indecorum  before  a  public  opinion  of  the 
absent  and  the  dead. 

Of  these  two  influences — that  of  Reason  and  that 
of  Living  Example — which  would  a  wise  reformer  re- 
inforce ?  Christ  chose  the  last.  He  gathered  all  men 
into  a  common  relation  to  himself,  and  demanded  that 
each  should  set  him  on  the  pedestal  of  his  heart,  giving 
a  lower  place  to  all  other  objects  of  worship,  to  father 
and  mother,  to  husband  or  wife.  In  him  should  the 
loyalty  of  all  hearts  centre  ;  he  should  be  their  pattern, 
their  Authority  and  Judge.  Of  him  and  his  service  should 
no  man  be  ashamed,  but  to  those  who  acknowledged  it 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  169 

morality  should  be  an  easy  yoke,  and  the  law  of  right  as 
spontaneous  as  the  law  of  life  ;  sufferings  should  be  easy 
to  bear,  and  the  loss  of  worldly  friends  repaired  by  a 
new  home  in  the  bosom  of  the  Christian  kingdom  ; 
finally,  in  death  itself  their  sleep  should  be  sweet  upon 
whose  tombstone  it  could  be  written  "  Obdormivit  in 
Christo." 

In  his  treatment  of  this  part  of  the  subject,  the 
work  of  Christ  as  the  true  Creator,  through  the 
Christian  Church,  of  living  morality,  what  is  peculiar 
and  impressive  is  the  way  in  which  sympathy  with 
Christianity  in  its  antique  and  original  form,  in  its 
most  austere,  unearthly,  exacting  aspects,  is  combined 
with  sympathy  with  the  practical  realities  of  modern 
hfe,  with  its  boldness,  its  freedom,  its  love  of  improve- 
ment, its  love  of  truth.  It  is  no  common  grasp  w^hich 
can  embrace  both  so  easily  and  so  firmly.  He  is  one 
of  those  writers  whose  strong  hold  on  their  ideas  is 
shown  by  the  facility  with  which  they  can  afford  to 
make  large  admissions,  which  are  at  first  sight 
startling.  Nowhere  are  more  tremendous  passages 
written  than  in  this  book  about  the  corruptions  of 
that  Christianity  which  yet  the  writer  holds  to  be  the 
one  hope  and  safeguard  of  mankind.  He  is  not 
afraid  to  pursue  his  investigation  independently  of 
any  inquiry  into  the  peculiar  claims  to  authority  of 
the  documents  on  w^hich  it  rests.  He  at  once  goes  to 
their  substance  and  their  facts,  and  the  Person  and 
Life  and  Character  w^hich  they  witness  to.  He  is  not 
afraid  to  put  Faith  on  exactly  the  same  footing  as 


170  ECCE  HOMO  ix 

Life,  neither  higher  nor  lower,  as  the  title  to  member- 
ship in  the  Church  ;  a  doctrine  which,  if  it  makes 
imperfect  and  rudimentary  faith  as  little  a  disqualifi- 
cation as  imperfect  and  inconsistent  life,  obviously 
does  not  exclude  the  further  belief  that  deliberate 
heresy  is  on  the  same  level  with  deliberate  profligacy. 
But  the  clear  sense  of  w^hat  is  substantial,  the  power 
of  piercing  through  accidents  and  conditions  to  the 
real  kernel  of  the  matter,  the  scornful  disregard  of  all 
entanglement  of  apparent  contradictions  and  incon- 
sistencies, enable  him  to  bring  out  the  lesson  which 
he  finds  before  him  with  overpowering  force.  He 
sees  before  him  immense  mercy,  immense  condescen- 
sion, immense  indulgence ;  but  there  are  also  immense 
requirements — requirements  not  to  be  fulfilled  by  rule 
or  exhausted  by  the  lapse  of  time,  and  which  the 
higher  they  raise  men  the  more  they  exact — an 
immense  seriousness  and  strictness,  an  immense  care 
for  substance  and  truth,  to  the  disregard,  if  necessary, 
of  the  letter  and  the  form.  The  "  Dispensation  of  the 
Spirit  "  has  seldom  had  an  interpreter  more  in  earnest 
and  more  determined  to  see  meaning  in  his  words. 
We  have  room  but  for  two  illustrations.  He  is  com- 
bating the  notion  that  the  work  of  Christianity  and 
the  Church  nowadays  is  with  the  good,  and  that  it 
is  waste  of  hope  and  strength  to  try  to  reclaim  the 
bad  and  the  lost : — 

Once  more,  however,  the  world   may  answer,  Christ 
may  be  consistent  in  this,  but  is  he  wise  ?      It  may  be 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  171 

true  that  he  does  demand  an  enthusiasm,  and  that  such 
an  enthusiasm  may  be  capable  of  awakening  the  moral 
sense  in  hearts  in  which  it  seemed  dead.  But  if,  not- 
withstanding this  demand,  only  a  very  few  members  ot 
the  Christian  Church  are  capable  of  the  enthusiasm, 
what  use  in  imposing  on  the  whole  body  a  task  which 
the  vast  majority  are  not  qualified  to  perform  ?  Would 
it  not  be  well  to  recognise  the  fact  which  we  cannot  alter, 
and  to  abstain  from  demanding  from  frail  human  nature 
what  human  nature  cannot  render  ?  Would  it  not  be 
well  for  the  Church  to  impose  upon  its  ordinary  members 
only  ordinary  duties  ?  When  the  Bernard  or  the  White- 
field  appears  let  her  by  all  means  find  occupation  for  him. 
Let  her  in  such  cases  boldly  invade  the  enemy's  country. 
But  in  ordinary  times  would  it  not  be  well  for  her  to 
confine  herself  to  more  modest  and  practicable  under- 
takings ?  There  is  much  for  her  to  do  even  though  she 
should  honestly  confess  herself  unable  to  reclaim  the 
lost.  She  may  reclaim  the  young,  administer  reproof  to 
slight  lapses,  maintain  a  high  standard  of  virtue,  soften 
manners,  diffuse  enlightenment.  Would  it  not  be  well 
for  her  to  adapt  her  ends  to  her  means  ? 

No,  it  would  not  be  well ;  it  would  be  fatal  to  do  so  ; 
and  Christ  meant  what  he  said,  and  said  what  was  true, 
when  he  pronounced  the  Enthusiasm  of  Humanity  to  be 
everything,  and  the  absence  of  it  to  be  the  absence  of 
everything.  The  world  understands  its  own  routine  well 
enough ;  what  it  does  not  understand  is  the  mode  of 
changing  that  routine.  It  has  no  appreciation  of  the 
nature  or  measure  of  the  power  of  enthusiasm,  and  on 
this  matter  it  learns  nothing  from  experience,  but  after 
every  fresh  proof  of  that  power,  relapses  from   its  brief 


172  ECCE  HOMO  ix 

astonishment  into  its  old  ignorance,  and  commits  pre- 
cisely the  same  miscalculation  on  the  next  occasion.  The 
power  of  enthusiasm  is,  indeed,  far  from  being  unlimited  ; 
in  some  cases  it  is  very  small.  .   .   . 

But  one  power  enthusiasm  has  almost  without  limit — 
the  power  of  propagating  itself;  and  it  was  for  this  that 
Christ  depended  on  it.  He  contemplated  a  Church  in 
which  the  Enthusiasm  of  Humanity  should  not  be  felt 
by  two  or  three  only,  but  widely.  In  whatever  heart  it 
might  be  kindled,  he  calculated  that  it  would  pass 
rapidly  into  other  hearts,  and  that  as  it  can  make  its  heat 
felt  outside  the  Church,  so  it  would  preserve  the  Church 
itself  from  lukewarmness.  For  a  lukewarm  Church  he 
would  not  condescend  to  legislate,  nor  did  he  regard  it  as 
at  all  inevitable  that  the  Church  should  become  luke- 
warm. He  laid  it  as  a  duty  upon  the  Church  to  reclaim 
the  lost,  because  he  did  not  think  it  Utopian  to  suppose 
that  the  Church  might  be  not  in  its  best  members  only, 
but  through  its  whole  body,  inspired  by  that  ardour  of 
humanity  that  can  charm  away  the  bad  passions  of  the 
wildest  heart,  and  open  to  the  savage  and  the  outlaw 
lurking  in  moral  wildernesses  an  entrancing  view  of  the 
holy  and  tranquil  order  that  broods  over  the  streets  and 
palaces  of  the  city  of  God.  .   .  . 

Christianity  is  an  enthusiasm  or  it  is  nothing  ;  and  if 
there  sometimes  appear  in  the  history  of  the  Church 
instances  of  a  tone  which  is  pure  and  high  without  being 
enthusiastic,  of  a  mood  of  Christian  feeling  which  is 
calmly  favourable  to  virtue  without  being  victorious 
against  vice,  it  will  probably  be  found  that  all  that  is 
respectable  in  such  a  mood  is  but  the  slowly-subsiding 
movement  of  an  earlier  enthusiasm,  and  all  that  is  pro- 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  173 

duced  by  the  lukewarmness  of  the  time  itself  is  hypocrisy 
and  corrupt  conventionaHsm. 

Christianity,  then,  would  sacrifice  its  divinity  if  it 
abandoned  its  missionary  character  and  became  a  mere 
educational  institution.  Surely  this  Article  of  Conversion 
is  the  true  articidiis  staiitis  aiit  cade7itis  ecclesiae.  When 
the  power  of  reclaiming  the  lost  dies  out  of  the  Church, 
it  ceases  to  be  the  Church.  It  may  remain  a  useful 
institution,  though  it  is  most  likely  to  become  an  immoral 
and  mischievous  one.  Where  the  power  remains,  there, 
whatever  is  wanting,  it  may  still  be  said  that  "  the  taber- 
nacle of  God  is  with  men." 

One  more  passage  about  those  who  in  all  Churches 
and  sects  think  that  all  that  Christ  meant  by  His  call 
was  to  give  them  a  means  to  do  what  the  French  call 
faire  son  sahct: — 

It  appears  throughout  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  that 
there  was  a  class  of  persons  whom  Christ  regarded  with 
peculiar  aversion — the  persons  who  call  themselves  one 
thing  and  are  another.  He  describes  them  by  a  word 
which  originally  meant  an  "  actor."  Probably  it  may  in 
Christ's  time  have  already  become  current  in  the  sense 
which  we  give  to  the  word  "hypocrite."  But  no  doubt 
whenever  it  was  used  the  original  sense  of  the  word  was 
distinctly  remembered.  And  in  this  Sermon,  whenever 
Christ  denounces  any  vice,  it  is  with  the  words  "  Be  not 
you  like  the  actors."  In  common  with  all  great  reformers, 
Christ  felt  that  honesty  in  word  and  deed  was  the  funda- 
mental virtue ;  dishonesty,  including  affectation,  self- 
consciousness,  love  of  stage  effect,  the  one  incurable  vice. 
Our  thoughts,  words,  and  deeds  are  to  be  of  a  piece. 


174  ECCE  HOMO 


IX 


For  example,  if  we  would  pray  to  God,  let  us  go  into 
some  inner  room  where  none  but  God  shall  see  us  ;  to 
pray  at  the  corner  of  the  streets,  where  the  passing 
crowd  may  admire  our  devotion,  is  to  act  a  prayer.  If 
we  would  keep  down  the  rebellious  flesh  by  fasting,  this 
concerns  ourselves  only  ;  it  is  acting  to  parade  before 
the  world  our  self-mortification.  And  if  we  would  put 
down  sin  let  us  put  it  down  in  ourselves  first  ;  it  is  only 
the  actor  who  begins  by  frowning  at  it  in  others.  But 
there  are  subtler  forms  of  hypocrisy,  which  Christ  does 
not  denounce,  probably  because  they  have  sprung  since 
out  of  the  corruption  of  a  subtler  creed.  The  hypocrite 
of  that  age  wanted  simply  money  or  credit  with  the 
people.  His  ends  were  those  of  the  vulgar,  though  his 
means  were  different.  Christ  endeavoured  to  cure  both 
alike  of  their  vulgarity  by  telling  them  of  other  riches 
and  another  happiness  laid  up  in  heaven.  Some,  of 
course,  would  neither  understand  nor  regard  his  words, 
others  would  understand  and  receive  them.  But  a  third 
class  would  receive  them  without  understanding  them, 
and  instead  of  being  cured  of  their  avarice  and  sensuality, 
would  simply  transfer  them  to  new  objects  of  desire. 
Shrewd  enough  to  discern  Christ's  greatness,  instinctively 
believing  what  he  said  to  be  true,  they  would  set  out 
with  a  triumphant  eagerness  in  pursuit  of  the  heavenly 
riches,  and  laugh  at  the  short-sighted  and  weak-minded 
speculator  who  contented  himself  with  the  easy  but  in- 
significant profits  of  a  worldly  life.  They  would  practise 
assiduously  the  rules  by  which  Christ  said  heaven  was  to 
be  won.  They  would  patiently  turn  the  left  cheek,  inde- 
fatigibly  walk  the  two  miles,  they  would  bless  with  effusion 
those  who  cursed  them,  and  pray  fluently  for  those  who 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  175 

used  them  spitefully.  To  love  their  enemies,  to  love  any 
one,  they  would  certainly  find  impossible,  but  the  out- 
ward signs  of  love  might  easily  be  learnt.  And  thus 
there  would  arise  a  new  class  of  actors,  not  like  those 
whom  Christ  denounced,  exhibiting  before  an  earthly 
audience  and  receiving  their  pay  from  human  managers, 
but  hoping  to  be  paid  for  their  performance  out  of  the 
incorruptible  treasures,  and  to  impose  by  their  dramatic 
talent  upon  their  Father  in  heaven. 

We  have  said  that  one  peculiarity  of  this  work  is 
the  connection  which  is  kept  in  view  from  the  first 
between  the  Founder  and  His  work ;  between  Christ 
and  the  Christian  Church,  He  finds  it  impossible  to 
speak  of  Him  without  that  still  existing  witness  of  His 
having  come,  which  is  only  less  wonderful  and  unique 
than  Himself.  This  is  where,  for  the  present,  he 
leaves  the  subject : — 

For  the  New  Jerusalem,  as  we  witness  it,  is  no 
more  exempt  from  corruption  than  was  the  Old.  .  .  . 
First  the  rottenness  of  dying  superstitions,  their  bar- 
baric manners,  their  intellectualism  preferring  system 
and  debate  to  brotherhood,  strangling  Christianity  with 
theories  and  framing  out  of  it  a  charlatan's  philosophy 
which  madly  tries  to  stop  the  progress  of  science — all 
these  corruptions  have  in  the  successive  ages  of  its  long 
life  infected  the  Church,  and  many  new  and  monstrous 
perversions  of  individual  character  have  disgraced  it. 
The  creed  which  makes  human  nature  richer  and  larger 
makes  men  at  the  same  time  capable  of  profounder  sins  ; 
admitted  into  a  holier  sanctuary,  they  are  exposed  to  the 


176  ECCE  HOMO 


IX 


temptation  of  a  greater  sacrilege  ;  awakened  to  the  sense 
of  new  obligations,  they  sometimes  lose  their  simple 
respect  for  the  old  ones  ;  saints  that  have  resisted  the 
subtlest  temptations  sometimes  begin  again,  as  it  were, 
by  yielding  without  a  struggle  to  the  coarsest ;  hypocrisy 
has  become  tenfold  more  ingenious  and  better  supplied 
with  disguises  ;  in  short,  human  nature  has  inevitably 
developed  downwards  as  well  as  upwards,  and  if  the 
Christian  ages  be  compared  with  those  of  heathenism, 
they  are  found  worse  as  well  as  better,  and  it  is  possible 
to  make  it  a  question  whether  mankind  has  gained  on 
the  whole.   .   .   . 

But  the  triumph  of  the  Christian  Church  is  that  it 
is  there — that  the  most  daring  of  all  speculative  dreams, 
instead  of  being  found  impracticable,  has  been  carried 
into  effect,  and  when  carried  into  effect,  instead  of  being 
confined  to  a  few  select  spirits,  has  spread  itself  over  a 
vast  space  of  the  earth's  surface,  and  when  thus  diffused, 
instead  of  giving  place  after  an  age  or  two  to  something 
more  adapted  to  a  later  time,  has  endured  for  two  thou- 
sand years,  and  at  the  end  of  two  thousand  years,  instead 
of  lingering  as  a  mere  wreck  spared  by  the  tolerance  of 
the  lovers  of  the  past,  still  displays  vigour  and  a  capacity 
of  adjusting  itself  to  new  conditions,  and  lastly,  in  all 
the  transformations  it  undergoes,  remains  visibly  the 
same  thing  and  inspired  by  its  Founder's  universal  and 
unquenchable  spirit. 

It  is  in  this  and  not  in  any  freedom  from  abuses 
that  the  divine  power  of  Christianity  appears.  Again,  it 
is  in  this,  and  not  in  any  completeness  or  all-suffi- 
ciency.  .   .   . 

But    the  achievement  of   Christ  in  founding  by  his 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  177 

single  will  and  power  a  structure  so  durable  and  so 
universal,  is  like  no  other  achievement  which  history 
records.  The  masterpieces  of  the  men  of  action  are 
coarse  and  common  in  comparison  with  it,  and  the 
masterpieces  of  speculation  flimsy  and  insubstantial. 
When  we  speak  of  it  the  commonplaces  of  admiration 
fail  us  altogether.  Shall  we  speak  of  the  originality  of 
the  design,  of  the  skill  displayed  in  the  execution  ?  All 
such  terms  are  inadequate.  Originality  and  contriving 
skill  operated  indeed,  but,  as  it  were,  implicitly.  The 
creative  effort  which  produced  that  against  which,  it  is 
said,  the  gates  of  hell  shall  not  prevail,  cannot  be 
analysed.  No  architects'  designs  were  furnished  for  the 
New  Jerusalem,  no  committee  drew  up  rules  for  the 
Universal  Commonwealth.  If  in  the  works  of  Nature  we 
can  trace  the  indications  of  calculation,  of  a  struggle 
with  difficulties,  of  precaution,  of  ingenuity,  then  in 
Christ's  work  it  may  be  that  the  same  indications  occur. 
But  these  inferior  and  secondary  powers  were  not  con- 
sciously exercised  ;  they  were  implicitly  present  in  the 
manifold  yet  single  creative  act.  The  inconceivable 
work  was  done  in  calmness  ;  before  the  eyes  of  men  it 
was  noiselessly  accomplished,  attracting  little  attention. 
Who  can  describe  that  which  unites  men  ?  Who  has 
entered  into  the  formation  of  speech  which  is  the  symbol 
of  their  union  ?  Who  can  describe  exhaustively  the 
origin  of  civil  society  ?  He  who  can  do  these  things 
can  explain  the  origin  of  the  Christian  Church.  For 
others  it  must  be  enough  to  say,  "  the  Holy  Ghost  fell  on 
those  that  believed."  No  man  saw  the  building  of  the 
New  Jerusalem,  the  workmen  crowded  together,  the  un- 
finished walls   and   un paved  streets  ;  no  man  heard  the 

VOL.  II  N 


178  ECCE  HOMO 


IX 


chink  of  trowel  and  pickaxe  ;  it  descended  out  of  heaven 
from  God. 

And  here  we  leave  this  remarkable  book.  It 
seems  to  us  one  of  those  which  permanently  influence 
opinion,  not  so  much  by  argument  as  such,  as  by 
opening  larger  views  of  the  familiar  and  the  long- 
debated,  by  deepening  the  ordinary  channels  of 
feeling,  and  by  bringing  men  back  to  seriousness  and 
rekindling  their  admiration,  their  awe,  their  love, 
about  what  they  know  best.  We  have  not  dwelt  on 
minute  criticisms  about  points  to  which  exception 
might  be  taken.  We  have  not  noticed  even  positions 
on  which,  without  further  explanation,  we  should 
more  or  less  widely  disagree.  The  general  scope- of 
it,  and  the  seriousness  as  well  as  the  grandeur  and 
power  with  which  the.  main  idea  is  worked  out,  seem 
to  make  mere  secondary  objections  intolerable.  It 
is  a  fragment,  with  the  disadvantages  of  a  fragment. 
What  is  put  before  us  is  far  from  complete,  and  it 
needs  to  be  completed.  In  part  at  least  an  answer 
has  been  given  to  the  question  ivhat  Christ  was ;  but 
the  question  remains,  not  less  important,  and  of 
which  the  answer  is  only  here  foreshadowed,  who  He 
was.  But  so  far  as  it  goes,  what  it  does  is  this :  in 
the  face  of  all  attempts  to  turn  Christianity  into  a 
sentiment  or  a  philosophy,  it  asserts,  in  a  most  re- 
markable manner,  a  historical  religion  and  a  his- 
torical Church ;  but  it  also  seeks,  in  a  manner 
equally  remarkable,  to  raise  and  elevate  the  thoughts 
of  all,  on  all  sides,  about  Christ,  as  He  showed  Him- 


IX  ECCE  HOMO  179 

self  in  the  world,  and  about  what  Christianity  was 
meant  to  be ;  to  touch  new  springs  of  feeling ;  to 
carry  back  the  Church  to  its  "hidden  fountains,"  and 
pierce  through  the  veils  which  hide  from  us  the 
reality  of  the  wonders  in  which  it  began. 

The  book  is  indeed  a  protest  against  the  stiffness 
of  all  cast-iron  systems,  and  a  warning  against  trust- 
ing in  what  is  worn  out.  But  it  shows  how  the 
modern  world,  so  complex,  so  refined,  so  wonderful, 
is,  in  all  that  it  accounts  good,  but  a  reflection  of 
what  is  described  in  the  Gospels,  and  its  civilisation, 
but  an  application  of  the  laws  of  Christ,  changing,  it 
may  be,  indefinitely  in  outward  form,  but  depending 
on  their  spirit  as  its  ever-living  spring.  If  we  have 
misunderstood  this  book,  and  its  cautious  under- 
statements are  not  understatements  at  all,  but  repre- 
sent the  limits  beyond  which  the  writer  does  not  go, 
we  can  only  say  again  it  is  one  of  the  strangest 
among  books.  If  we  have  not  misunderstood  him, 
we  have  before  us  a  writer  who  has  a  right  to  claim 
deference  from  those  who  think  deepest  and  know 
most,  when  he  pleads  before  them  that  not  Philo- 
sophy can  save  and  reclaim  the  world,  but  Faith  in  a 
Divine  Person  who  is  worthy  of  it,  allegiance  to  a 
Divine  Society  which  He  founded,  and  union  of 
hearts  in  the  object  for  which  He  created  it. 


THE  AUTHOR  OF  "ROBERT  ELSMERE"  ON 
A  NEW  REFORMATION  ^ 

Mrs.  Ward,  in  the  Nineteenth  Century^  develops 
with  warmth  and  force  the  theme  and  serious  purpose 
of  Robert  Elsine7'e  ;  and  she  does  so,  using  the  same 
Uterary  method  which  she  used,  certainly  with  effect, 
in  the  story  itself.  Every  age  has  its  congenial  fashion 
of  discussing  the  great  questions  which  affect,  or  seem 
to  affect,  the  fate  of  mankind.  According  to  the 
time  and  its  circumstances,  it  is  a  Sinmna  Theologiae, 
or  a  Divitia  Commedia^  or  a  Novum  Organuni^  or  a 
Calvin's  Institutes^  or  a  Locke  On  the  Understandings 
or  an  Encyclopedia^  or  a  Candide^  which  sets  people 
thinking  more  than  usual  and  comparing  their 
thoughts.  Long  ago  in  the  history  of  human  ques- 
tioning, Plato  and  Cicero  discovered  the  advantages 
over  dry  argument  of  character  and  easy  debate,  and 
so  much  of  story  as  clothed  abstractions  and  hard 
notions    with    human    life    and    affections.      It    is   a 

^   Guardian,  6th  March  1889. 


X  ON  A  NEW  REFORMATION  181 

weighty  precedent.  And  as  the  prophetess  of  a 
"  New  Reformation  "  Mrs.  Ward  has  reverted  to  what 
is  substantially  the  same  method.  She  is  within  her 
right.  We  do  not  blame  her  for  putting  her  argument 
into  the  shape  of  a  novel,  and  bringing  out  the  points 
of  her  case  in  the  trials  and  passionate  utterances  of 
imaginary  persons,  or  in  a  conversation  about  their 
mental  history.  But  she  must  take  the  good  with  the 
bad.  Such  a  method  has  its  obvious  advantages,  in 
freedom,  and  convenience,  and  range  of  illustration. 
It  has  its  disadvantages.  The  dealer  in  imagination 
may  easily  become  the  unconscious  slave  of  imagina- 
tion ;  and,  living  in  a  self- constructed  world,  may 
come  to  forget  that  there  is  any  other;  and  the 
temptation  to  unfairness  becomes  enormous  when  all 
who  speak,  on  one  side  or  the  other,  only  speak  as 
you  make  or  let  them  speak. 

It  is  to  imagination  that  Robert  Elsmere  makes  its 
main  appeal,  undoubtedly  a  powerful  and  pathetic 
one.  It  bids  us  ask  ourselves  what,  with  the  pheno- 
mena before  us,  we  can  conceive  possible  and  real. 
It  imphes,  of  course,  much  learning,  with  claims  of 
victory  in  the  spheres  of  history  and  science,  with 
names  great  in  criticism,  of  whom  few  readers  probably 
can  estimate  the  value,  though  all  may  be  affected  by 
the  formidable  array.  But  it  is  not  in  these  things,  as 
with  a  book  like  Supernatural  Religion^  that  the  gist 
of  the  argument  lies.  The  alleged  results  of  criticism 
are  taken  for  granted ;  whether  rightly  or  wrongly  the 
great  majority  of  readers  certainly  cannot  tell.     But 


182   THE  AUTHOR  OF  "ROBERT  ELSMERE  "    x 

then  the  effect  of  the  book,  or  the  view  which  it  repre- 
sents, begins.  Imagine  a  man,  pure-minded,  earnest, 
sensitive,  self-devoted,  plunged  into  the  tremendous 
questions  of  our  time.  Bit  by  bit  he  finds  what  he 
thought  to  be  the  truth  of  truths  breaking  away.  In 
the  darkness  and  silence  with  which  nature  covers  all 
beyond  the  world  of  experience  he  thought  he  had 
found  light  and  certainty  from  on  high.  He  thought 
that  he  had  assurances  and  pledges  which  could  not 
fail  him,  that  God  was  in  the  world,  governed  it,  loved 
it,  showed  Himself  in  it.  He  thought  he  had  a  great 
and  authentic  story  to  fall  back  upon,  and  a  Sacred 
Book,  which  was  its  guaranteed  witness,  and  by  which 
God  still  spoke  to  his  soul.  He  thought  that,  whatever 
he  did  not  know,  he  knew  this,  and  this  was  a  hope  to 
live  and  die  in  ;  with  all  that  he  saw  round  him,  of 
pain  and  sin  and  misery,  here  was  truth  on  which  he 
could  rest  secure,  in  his  fight  with  evil.  Like  the  rest 
of  us,  he  knew  that  terrible,  far-reaching,  heart- 
searching  questions  were  abroad ;  that  all  that  to  him 
was  sacred  and  unapproachable  in  its  sanctity  was  not 
so  to  all — was  not  so,  perhaps,  to  men  whom  he  felt 
to  be  stronger  and  more  knowing  than  himself — was 
not  so,  perhaps,  to  some  who  seemed  to  him  to  stand, 
in  character  and  purpose,  at  a  moral  height  above 
him.  Still  he  thought  himself  in  full  possession  of  the 
truth  which  God  had  given  him,  till  at  length,  in 
one  way  or  another,  the  tide  of  questioning  reached 
him.  Then  begins  the  long  agony.  He  hears  that 
what  he  never  doubted  is  said  to  be  incredible,  and  is 


X  ON  A  NEW  REFORMATION  183 

absolutely  given  up.  He  finds  himself  surrounded  by 
hostile  powers  of  thought,  by  an  atmosphere  which 
insensibly  but  irresistibly  governs  opinion,  by  doubt 
and  denial  in  the  air,  by  keen  and  relentless  intellect, 
before  which  he  can  only  be  silent ;  he  sees  and  hears 
all  round  the  disintegrating  process  going  on  in  the 
creeds  and  institutions  and  intellectual  statements,  of 
Christianity.  He  is  assured,  and  sees  some  reason  to 
believe  it,  that  the  intellect  of  the  day  is  against  him 
and  his  faith ;  and  further,  that  unreality  taints  every- 
thing, belief  and  reasoning,  and  profession  and  con- 
duct. Step  by  step  he  is  forced  from  one  position 
and  another ;  the  process  was  a  similar  and  a  familiar 
one  when  the  great  Roman  secession  was  going  on 
fifty  years  ago.  But  now,  in  Robert  Elsmere,  comes 
the  upshot.  He  is  not  landed,  as  some  logical  minds 
have  been,  which  have  gone  through  the  same  process, 
in  mere  unbelief  or  indifference.  He  is  too  good  for 
that.  Something  of  his  old  Christianity  is  too  deeply 
engrained  in  him.  He  cannot  go  back  from  the 
moral  standard  to  which  it  accustomed  him.  He  will 
serve  God  in  a  Christian  spirit  and  after  the  example 
of  Christ,  though  not  in  what  can  claim  to  be  called  a 
Christian  way.  He  is  the  beginner  of  one  more  of 
the  numberless  attempts  to  find  a  new  mode  of 
religion,  purer  than  any  of  the  old  ones  could  be — 
of  what  Mrs.  Ward  calls  in  her  new  paper  "A  New 
Reformation." 

In  this  paper,  which  is  more  distinctly  a  dialogue 
on  the  Platonic  model,  she  isolates  the  main  argument 


184   THE  AUTHOR  OF  "ROBERT  ELSMERE  "     x 

on  which  the  story  was  based,  but  without  any  distinct 
reference  to  any  of  the  criticisms  on  her  book.  Robert 
Elsmerc  rests  on  the  achievements  of  historic  criticism, 
chiefly  German  criticism.  From  the  traditional,  old- 
fashioned  Christian  way  of  regarding  and  using  the 
old  records  which  we  call  the  Bible,  the  ground,  we 
are  told,  is  hopelessly  and  for  ever  cut  away  by  German 
historical  criticism.  And  the  difference  between  the 
old  and  the  modern  way  of  regarding  and  using  them 
is  expressed  by  the  difference  between  bad  trajislation 
and  good ;  the  old  way  of  reading,  quoting,  and  esti- 
mating ancient  documents  of  all  kinds  was  purblind, 
lifeless,  narrow,  mechanical,  whereas  the  modern  com- 
parative and  critical  method  not  only  is  more  sure  in 
important  questions  of  authenticity,  but  puts  true  life 
and  character  and  human  feeling  and  motives  into 
the  personages  who  wrote  these  documents,  and  of 
whom  they  speak.  These  books  were  entirely  mis- 
understood, even  if  people  knew  the  meaning  of  their 
words ;  now,  at  last,  we  can  enter  into  their  real  spirit 
and  meaning.  And  where  such  a  change  of  method 
and  point  of  view,  as  regards  these  documents,  is 
wholesale  and  sweeping,  it  involves  a  wholesale  and 
sweeping  change  in  all  that  is  founded  on  them. 
Revised  ideas  about  the  Bible  mean  a  revised 
and  reconstructed  Christianity  —  "A  New  Reforma- 
tion." 

Mrs.  Ward  lays  more  stress  than  everybody  will 
agree  to  on  what  she  likens  to  the  difference  between 
^ood  iranslatiofi  and  bad^  in  dealing  with  the  materials 


X  ON  A  NEW  REFORMATION  185 

of  history.  Doubtless,  in  our  time,  the  historical 
imagination,  like  the  historical  conscience,  has  been 
awakened.  In  history,  as  in  other  things,  the  effort 
after  the  real  and  the  living  has  been  very  marked ; 
it  has  sometimes  resulted,  as  we  know,  in  that  parad- 
ing of  the  real  which  we  call  the  realistic.  The  mode 
of  telling  a  story  or  stating  a  case  varies,  even  charac- 
teristically, from  age  to  age,  from  Macaulay  to  Hume, 
from  Hume  to  Rapin,  from  Rapin  to  Holinshed  or 
Hall ;  but  after  all,  the  story  in  its  main  features 
remains,  after  allowing  for  the  differences  in  the  mode 
of  presenting  it.  German  criticism,  to  which  we  are 
expected  to  defer,  has  its  mode.  It  combines  two 
elements — a  diligent,  searching,  lawyer-like  habit  of 
cross-examination,  laborious,  complete  and  generally 
honest,  which,  when  it  is  not  spiteful  or  insolent, 
deserves  all  the  praise  it  receives ;  but  with  it  a  sense 
of  the  probable,  in  dealing  with  the  materials  collected, 
and  a  straining  after  attempts  to  construct  theories 
and  to  give  a  vivid  reality  to  facts  and  relations,  which 
are  not  always  so  admirable ;  which  lead,  in  fact, 
sometimes  to  the  height  of  paradox,  or  show  mere  in- 
capacity to  deal  with  the  truth  and  depth  of  life,  or  make 
use  of  a  poor  and  mean  standard — 7nesqinn  would  be 
the  French  word — in  the  interpretation  of  actions  and 
aims.  It  has  impressed  on  us  the  lesson — not  to  be 
forgotten  when  we  read  Mrs.  Ward's  lists  of  learned 
names — that  weight  and  not  number  is  the  test  of 
good  evidence.  German  learning  is  decidedly  impos- 
ing.    But  after  all  there  are  Germans  and  Germans ; 


186      THE  AUTHOR  OF  "  ROBERT  ELSMERE  "  x 

and  with  all  that  there  has  been  of  great  in  German 
work  there  has  been  also  a  large  proportion  of  what 
is  bad — conceited,  arrogant,  shallow,  childish.  German 
criticism  has  been  the  hunting-ground  of  an  insatiable 
love  of  sport — may  we  not  say,  without  irreverence, 
the  scene  of  the  discovery  of  a  good  many  mares' 
nests  ?  When  the  question  is  asked,  why  all  this  mass 
of  criticism  has  made  so  little  impression  on  English 
thought,  the  answer  is,  because  of  its  extravagant  love 
of  theorising,  because  of  its  divergences  and  variations, 
because  of  its  negative  results.  Those  who  have  been 
so  eager  to  destroy  have  not  been  so  successful  in 
construction.  Clever  theories  come  to  nothing ; 
streams  which  began  with  much  noise  at  last  lose 
themselves  in  the  sand.  Undoubtedly,  it  presents  a 
very  important,  and,  in  many  ways,  interesting  class 
of  intellectual  phenomena,  among  the  many  groups  of 
such  inquiries,  moral,  philosophical,  scientific,  political, 
social,  of  which  the  world  is  full,  and  of  which  no 
sober  thinker  expects  to  see  the  end.  If  this  vaunted 
criticism  is  still  left  to  scholars,  it  is  because  it  is  still 
in  the  stage  in  which  only  scholars  are  competent  to 
examine  and  judge  it ;  it  is  not  fit  to  be  a  factor  in 
the  practical  thought  and  life  of  the  mass  of  mankind. 
Answers,  and  not  merely  questions,  are  what  we  want, 
who  have  to  live,  and  work,  and  die.  Criticism  has 
pulled  about  the  Bible  without  restraint  or  scruple. 
We  are  all  of  us  steeped  in  its  daring  assumptions 
and  shrewd  objections.  Have  its  leaders  yet  given 
us  an  account  which  it  is  reasonable  to  receive,  clear, 


X  ON  A  NEW  REFORMATION  187 

intelligible,  self-consistent  and  consistent  with  all  the 
facts,  of  what  this  mysterious  book  is  ? 

Meanwhile,  in  the  face  of  theories  and  conjectures 
and  negative  arguments,  there  is  something  in  the 
world  which  is  fact,  and  hard  fact.  The  Christian 
Church  is  the  most  potent  fact  in  the  most  important 
ages  of  the  world's  progress.  It  is  an  institution  like 
the  world  itself,  which  has  grown  up  by  its  own 
strength  and  according  to  its  own  principle  of  life,  full 
of  good  and  evil,  having  as  the  law  of  its  fate  to  be 
knocked  about  in  the  stern  development  of  events, 
exposed,  like  human  society,  to  all  kinds  of  vicissitudes 
and  alternations,  giving  occasion  to  many  a  scandal, 
and  shaking  the  faith  and  loyalty  of  many  a  son,  show- 
ing in  ample  measure  the  wear  and  tear  of  its  existence, 
battered,  injured,  sometimes  degenerate,  sometimes 
improved,  in  one  way  or  another,  since  those  dim 
and  long  distant  days  when  its  course  began;  but 
showing  in  all  these  ways  what  a  real  thing  it  is,  never 
in  the  extremity  of  storms  and  ruin,  never  in  the 
deepest  degradation  of  its  unfaithfulness,  losing  hold 
of  its  own  central  unchanging  faith,  and  never  in  its 
worst  days  of  decay  and  corruption  losing  hold  of  the 
power  of  self-correction  and  hope  of  recovery.  Solvitur 
ambula7ido  is  an  argument  to  which  Mrs.  Ward  appeals, 
in  reply  to  doubts  about  the  solidity  of  the  "New 
Reformation."  It  could  be  urged  more  modestly  if 
the  march  of  the  "New  Reformation"  had  lasted  for 
even  half  of  one  of  the  Christian  centuries.  The 
Church  is  in  the  world,  as  the  family  is  in  the  world, 


188      THE  AUTHOR  OF  "ROBERT  ELSMERE "  x 

as  the  State  is  in  the  world,  as  morahty  is  in  the  world, 
a  fact  of  the  same  order  and  greatness.  Like  these 
it  has  to  make  its  account  with  the  "  all-dissolving " 
assaults  of  human  thought.  Like  these  it  has  to 
prove  itself  by  living,  and  it  does  do  so.  In  all  its 
infinite  influences  and  ministries,  in  infinite  degrees 
and  variations,  it  is  the  public  source  of  light  and 
good  and  hope.  If  there  are  select  and  aristocratic 
souls  who  can  do  without  it,  or  owe  it  nothing,  the 
multitude  of  us  cannot.  And  the  Christian  Church 
is  founded  on  a  definite  historic  fact,  that  Jesus  Christ 
who  was  crucified  rose  from  the  dead ;  and,  coming 
from  such  an  author,  it  comes  to  us,  bringing  with  it 
the  Bible.  The  fault  of  a  book  like  Robert  Elsmere 
is  that  it  is  written  with  a  deliberate  ignoring  that 
these  two  points  are  not  merely  important,  but 
absolutely  fundamental,  in  the  problems  with  which 
it  deals.  With  these  not  faced  and  settled  it  is  like 
looking  out  at  a  prospect  through  a  window  of  which 
all  the  glass  is  ribbed  and  twisted,  distorting  every- 
thing. It  may  be  that  even  yet  we  imperfectly  under- 
stand our  wondrous  Bible.  It  may  be  that  we  have 
yet  much  to  learn  about  it.  It  may  be  that  there  is 
much  that  is  very  difficult  about  it.  Let  us  reverently 
and  fearlessly  learn  all  we  can  about  it.  Let  us  take 
care  not  to  misuse  it,  as  it  has  been  terribly  misused. 
But  coming  to  us  from  the  company  and  with  the 
sanction  of  Christ  risen,  it  never  can  be  merely  like 
other  books.  A  so-called  Christianity,  ignoring  or 
playing  with  Christ's  resurrection,  and  using  the  Bible 


X  ON"  A  NEW  REFORMATION  189 

as  a  sort  of  Homer,  may  satisfy  a  class  of  clever  and 
cultivated  persons.  It  may  be  to  them  the  parent  of 
high  and  noble  thoughts,  and  readily  lend  itself  to 
the  service  of  mankind.  But  it  is  well  in  so  serious 
a  matter  not  to  confuse  things.  This  new  religion 
may  borrow  from  Christianity  as  it  may  borrow  from 
Plato,  or  from  Buddhism,  or  Confucianism,  or  .even 
Islam.  But  it  is  not  Christianity.  Robert  Elsmere 
may  be  true  to  hfe,  as  representing  one  of  those 
tragedies  which  happen  in  critical  moments  of  history. 
But  a  Christianity  which  tells  us  to  think  of  Christ 
doing  good,  but  to  forget  and  put  out  of  sight  Christ 
risen  from  the  dead,  is  not  true  to  life.  It  is  as  delusive 
to  the  conscience  and  the  soul  as  it  is  illogical  to 
reason. 


XI 

KENAN'S  "VIE  DE  JESUS "^ 

Unbelief  is  called  upon  nowadays,  as  well  as 
belief,  to  give  its  account  of  the  origin  of  that  un- 
deniable and  most  important  fact  which  we  call  the 
Christian  religion.  And  if  it  is  true  that  in  some 
respects  the  circumstances  under  which  the  con- 
troversy is  carried  on  are,  as  it  has  been  alleged, 
more  than  heretofore  favourable  to  unbelief,  it  is 
also  true  that  in  some  other  respects  the  case  of 
unbelief  has  difficulties  which  it  had  not  once.  It 
has  to  accept  and  admit,  if  it  wishes  to  gain  a  favour- 
able hearing  from  the  present  generation,  the  unique 
and  surpassing  moral  grandeur,  depth,  and  attractive- 
ness of  Christianity.  The  polemic  method  which  set 
Christianity  in  broad  contrast  with  what  was  supposed 
to  be  best  and  highest  in  human  nature,  and  there- 
fore found  no  difficulty  in  tracing  to  a  bad  source 
what  was  itself  represented  to  be  bad,  is  not  a  method 
suited  to  the  ideas  and  feelings  of  our  time ;  and  the 

^  Hisioire  des  Origines  du   Christianisvie.      Livre   I.  —  Vie  de 
Jisus.     Par  Ernest  Renan.     Guardian,  9th  September  1S63. 


XI  REN AN'S  "  VIE  DE  JESUS  "  191 

sneers  and  sarcasms  of  the  last  century,  provoked  by 
abuses  and  inconsistencies  which  have  since  received 
their  ample  and  memorable  punishment,  cease  to 
produce  any  effect  on  readers  of  the  present  day, 
except  to  call  forth  a  passing  feeling  of  repugnance 
at  what  is  shallow  and  profane,  mixed,  it  may  be, 
sometimes,  with  an  equally  passing  admiration  for 
what  is  witty  and  brilliant.  Even  in  M.  Renan's 
view,  Voltaire  has  done  his  work,  and  is  out  of  date. 
Those  who  now  attack  Christianity  have  to  attack  it 
under  the  disadvantage  of  the  preliminary  admission 
that  its  essential  and  distinguishing  elements  are,  on 
the  whole,  in  harmony  and  not  in  discordance  with 
the  best  conceptions  of  human  duty  and  life,  and 
that  its  course  and  progress  have  been,  at  any  rate, 
concurrent  with  all  that  is  best  and  most  hopeful  in 
human  history.  First  allowing  that  as  a  fact  it  con- 
tains in  it  things  than  which  we  cannot  imagine  any- 
thing better,  and  without  which  we  should  never 
have  reached  to  where  we  are,  they  then  have  to 
dispute  its  divine  claims.  No  man  could  write 
persuasively  on  religion  now,  against  it  any  more 
than  for  it,  who  did  not  show  that  he  was  fully 
penetrated  not  only  with  its  august  and  beneficent 
aspect,  but  with  the  essential  and  everlasting  truths 
which,  in  however  imperfect  shapes,  or  whencesoever 
derived,  are  embodied  in  it  and  are  ministered  by  it 
to  society. 

That  Christianity  is,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  a  success- 
ful and  a  living  religion,  in  a  degree  absolutely  with- 


192  KENAN'S  "  VIE  DE  Jl^SUS  " 


XI 


out  parallel  in  any  other  religion,  is  the  point  from 
■which  its  assailants  have  now  to  start.  They  have 
also  to  take  account  of  the  circumstance,  to  the 
recognition  of  which  the  whole  course  of  modern 
thought  and  inquiry  has  brought  us,  that  it  has  been 
successful,  not  by  virtue  merely  of  any  outward  and 
accidental  favouring  circumstances,  but  of  its  intrinsic 
power  and  of  principles  which  are  inseparable  from 
its  substance.  This  being  the  condition  of  the  ques- 
tion, those  who  deny  its  claim  to  a  direct  Divine 
origin  have  to  frame  their  theory  of  it  so  as  to 
account,  on  principles  supposed  to  be  common  to  it 
and  other  religions,  not  merely  for  its  rise  and  its 
conquests,  but  for  those  broad  and  startling  differ- 
ences which  separate  it,  in  character  and  in  effects, 
from  all  other  known  religions.  They  have  to  show 
how  that  which  is  instinct  with  never-dying  truth 
sprang  out  of  what  was  false  and  mistaken,  if  not 
corrupt ;  how  that  which  alone  has  revealed  God  to 
man's  conscience  had  no  other  origin  than  what  in 
other  instances  has  led  men  through  enthusiasm  and 
imposture  to  a  barren  or  a  mischievous  superstition. 

Such  an  attempt  is  the  work  before  us — a  work 
destined,  probably,  both  from  its  ability  and  power 
and  from  its  faults,  to  be  for  modern  France  what 
the  work  of  Strauss  was  for  Germany,  the  standard 
expression  of  an  unbelief  which  shrinks  with  genuine 
distaste  from  the  coarse  and  negative  irreligion  of 
older  infidelity,  and  which  is  too  refined,  too  profound 
and  sympathetic  in  its  views  of  human  nature,  to  be 


XI  KENAN'S  "  VIE  DE  J^SUS  "  193 

insensible  to  those  numberless  points  in  which  as  a 
fact  Christianity  has  given  expression  to  the  best  and 
highest  thoughts  that  man  can  have.  Strauss,  to 
account  for  what  we  see,  imagined  an  idea,  or  a  set 
of  ideas,  gradually  worked  out  into  the  shape  of  a 
history,  of  which  scarcely  anything  can  be  taken  as 
real  matter  of  fact,  except  the  bare  existence  of  the 
person  who  was  clothed  in  the  process  of  time  with 
the  attributes  created  by  the  idealising  legend.  Such 
a  view  is  too  vague  and  indistinct  to  satisfy  French 
minds.  A  theory  of  this  sort,  to  find  general  accept- 
ance in  France,  must  start  with  concrete  history,  and 
not  be  history  held  in  solution  in  the  cloudy  shapes 
of  myths  which  vanish  as  soon  as  touched.  M. 
Renan's  process  is  in  the  main  the  reverse  of  Strauss's. 
He  undertakes  to  extract  the  real  history  recorded  in 
the  Gospels ;  and  not  only  so,  but  to  make  it  even 
more  palpable  and  interesting,  if  not  more  wonderful, 
than  it  seems  at  first  sight  in  the  original  records,  by 
removing  the  crust  of  mistake  and  exaggeration 
which  has  concealed  the  true  character  of  what  the 
narrative  records ;  by  rewriting  it  according  to  those 
canons  of  what  is  probable  and  intelligible  in  human 
life  and  capacity  which  are  recognised  in  the  public 
whom  he  addresses. 

Two  of  these  canons  govern  the  construction  of 
the  book.  One  of  them  is  the  assumption  that  in 
no  part  of  the  history  of  man  is  the  supernatural  to 
be  admitted.  This,  of  course,  is  not  peculiar  to  M. 
Renan,  though  he  lays  it  down  with  such  emphasis 

VOL,  II  •  .  0 


194  KENAN'S  "  VIE  DE  JESUS  "  xi 

in  all  his  works,  and  is  so  anxious  to  bring  it  into 
distinct  notice  on  every  occasion,  that  it  is  manifestly 
one  which  he  is  desirous  to  impress  on  all  who  read 
him,  as  one  of  the  ultimate  and  unquestionable 
foundations  of  all  historical  inquiry.  The  other  canon 
is  one  of  moral  likelihood,  and  it  is,  that  it  is  credible 
and  agreeable  to  what  we  gather  from  experience, 
that  the  highest  moral  elevation  ever  attained  by 
man  should  have  admitted  along  with  it,  and  for  its 
ends,  conscious  imposture.  On  the  first  of  these 
assumptions,  all  that  is  miraculous  in  the  Gospel 
narratives  is,  not  argued  about,  or,  except  perhaps  in 
one  instance — the  raising  of  Lazarus — attempted  to 
be  accounted  for  or  explained,  but  simply  left  out 
and  ignored.  On  the  second,  the  fact  from  which 
there  is  no  escape — that  He  whom  M.  Renan  vener- 
ates with  a  sincerity  which  no  one  can  doubt  as  the 
purest  and  greatest  of  moral  reformers,  did  claim 
power  from  God  to  work  miracles — is  harmonised 
with  the  assumption  that  the  claim  could  not  possibly 
have  been  a  true  one. 

M.  Renan  professes  to  give  an  historical  account 
of  the  way  in  which  the  deepest,  purest,  most  endur- 
ing religious  principles  known  among  men  were,  not 
merely  found  out  and  announced,  but  propagated 
and  impressed  upon  the  foremost  and  most  improved 
portions  of  mankind,  by  the  power  of  a  single  char- 
acter. It  is  impossible,  without  speaking  of  Jesus 
of  Nazareth  as  Christians  are  used  to  do,  to  speak  of 
His  character  and  of  the  results  of  His  appearance 


XI 


KENAN'S  "  VIE  DE  JESUS  "  195 


in  loftier  terms  than  this  professed  unbeliever  in  His 
Divine  claims.  But  when  the  account  is  drawn  out 
in  detail,  of  a  cause  alleged  to  be  sufficient  to  produce 
such  effects,  the  apparent  inadequacy  of  it  is  most 
startling.  When  we  think  of  what  Christianity  is 
and  has  done,  and  that,  in  M.  Renan's  view,  Christ, 
the  Christ  whom  he  imagines  and  describes,  is  all  in 
all  to  Christianity,  and  then  look  to  what  he  con- 
ceives to  have  been  the  original  spring  and  creative 
impulse  of  its  achievements,  the  first  feeling  is  that  no 
shifts  that  belief  has  sometimes  been  driven  to, 
to  keep  within  the  range  of  the  probable,  are  greater 
than  those  accepted  by  unbelief,  in  its  most  en- 
lightened and  reflecting  representations.  To  suppose 
such  an  one  as  M.  Renan  paints,  changing  the  whole 
course  of  history,  overturning  and  converting  the 
world,  and  founding  the  religion  which  M.  Renan 
thinks  the  lasting  religion  of  mankind,  involves  a 
force  upon  our  imagination  and  reason  to  which  it 
is  not  easy  to  find  a  parallel. 

His  view  is  that  a  Galilean  peasant,  in  advance  of 
his  neighbours  and  countrymen  only  in  the  purity, 
force,  and  singleness  of  purpose  with  which  he 
realised  the  highest  moral  truths  of  Jewish  religious 
wisdom,  first  charming  a  few  simple  provincials  by 
the  freshness  and  native  beauty  of  his  lessons,  was 
then  led  on,  partly  by  holy  zeal  against  falsehood 
and  wickedness,  partly  by  enthusiastic  delusions  as  to 
his  own  mission  and  office,  to  attack  the  institutions 
of  Judaism,  and  perished  in  the  conflict — and  that 


196  KENAN'S  "VIE  DE  JESUS 


XI 


this  was  the  cause  why  Christianity  and  Christendom 
came  to  be  and  exist.  This  is  the  explanation  which 
a  great  critical  historian,  fully  acquainted  with  the 
history  of  other  religions,  presents,  as  a  satisfactory 
one,  of  a  phenomenon  so  astonishing  and  unique  as 
that  of  a  religion  which  has  suited  itself  with  undi- 
minished vitality  to  the  changes,  moral,  social,  and 
political,  which  have  marked  the  eighteen  centuries  of 
European  history.  There  have  been  other  enthusiasts 
for  goodness  and  truth,  more  or  less  like  the  character 
which  M.  Renan  draws  in  his  book,  but  they  have 
never  yet  founded  a  universal  religion,  or  one  which 
had  the  privilege  of  perpetual  youth  and  unceasing 
self-renovation.  There  have  been  other  great  and 
imposing  religions,  commanding  the  allegiance  for 
century  after  century  of  millions  of  men ;  but  who 
will  dare  assert  that  any  of  these  religions,  that  of 
Sakya-Mouni,  of  Mahomet,  or  that  of  the  Vedas, 
could  possibly  be  the  religion,  or  satisfy  the  religious 
ideas  and  needs,  of  the  civilised  West  ? 

•  When  M.  Renan  comes  to  detail  he  is  as  strangely 
insensible  to  what  seem  at  first  sight  the  simplest 
demands  of  probability.  As  it  were  by  a  sort  of 
reaction  to  the  minute  realising  of  particulars  which 
has  been  in  vogue  among  some  Roman  Catholic 
writers,  M.  Renan  realises  too — realises  with  no  less 
force  and  vividness,  and,  according  to  his  point  of 
view,  with  no  less  affectionate  and  tender  interest. 
He  popularises  the  Gospels ;  but  not  for  a  religious 
set  of  readers  —  nor,   we   must  add,  for  readers  of 


XI  RENAN'S  "  VIE  DE  Jl^SUS  "  197 

thought  and  sense,  whether  interested  for  or  against 
Christianity,  but  for  a  public  who  study  life  in  the 
subtle  and  highly  wrought  novels  of  modern  times. 
He  appeals  from  what  is  probable  to  those  repre- 
sentations of  human  nature  which  aspire  to  pass 
beyond  the  conventional  and  commonplace,  and 
especially  he  dwells  on  neglected  and  unnoticed  ex- 
amples of  what  is  sweet  and  soft  and  winning.  But  it 
is  hard  to  recognise  the  picture  he  has  drawn  in  the 
materials  out  of  which  he  has  composed  it.  The 
world  is  tolerably  familiar  with  them.  If  there  is  a 
characteristic,  consciously  or  unconsciously  acknow- 
ledged in  the  Gospel  records,  it  is  that  of  the  gravity, 
the  plain  downright  seriousness,  the  laborious  earnest- 
ness, impressed  from  first  to  last  on  the  story.  When 
we  turn  from  these  to  his  pages  it  is  difficult  to  exag- 
gerate the  astounding  impression  which  his  epithets 
and  descriptions  have  on  the  mind.  We  are  told 
that  there  is  a  broad  distinction  between  the  early 
Galilean  days  of  hope  in  our  Lord's  ministry,  and  the 
later  days  of  disappointment  and  conflict ;  and  that 
if  we  look,  we  shall  find  in  Galilee  the  "/;z  etjoyeux 
77ioraUste^^^  full  of  a  ^^  conversation pleifie  de  gaiete  et  de 
charnie^'  of  ^' douce  gaiete  et  aimables  plaisanteries,'' 
with  a  '■'■  predication  suave  et  douce ^  toute  pleine  de  la 
nature  et  du  parfum  des  champs^'''  creating  out  of  his 
originality  of  mind  his  ^^  in7iocents  aphorismes,'"  and 
the  ^^ge7ire  delicieux''  of  parabolic  teaching;  "/^  char- 
mant  docteur  qui  pardo7i7iait  a  tons  pou7'vu  qii'on 
lai77iaty     He   lived   in   what   was   then  an  earthly 


198  KENAN'S  "  VIE  DE  J^SUS  "  xi 

paradise,  in  '■^lajoyeuse  Galilee,^''  in  the  midst  of  the 
^^ ?iafure  ravissa?ife^^  which  gave  to  everything  about 
the  Sea  of  Galilee  ^^  iin  tour  idyllique  et  charma?iC^ 
So  the  history  of  Christianity  at  its  birth  is  a  ^^  deli- 
cieuse  pastorale ^^''  an  ^^  idylle"  a  ^^7?iilieu  enivranf''  of 
joy  and  hope.  The  master  was  surrounded  by  a 
'■'■  batide  de  Joyeux  enfants,^^  a  "  troupe  gaie  et  vaga- 
bofide,''^  whose  existence  in  the  open  air  was  a  "per- 
petual enchantment."  The  disciples  were  ^^ ces petits 
comites  de  bonnes  gens,'''  very  simple,  very  credulous, 
and  like  their  country  full  of  a  ''''  senthjient  gai  et 
tendre  de  la  vie,"  and  of  an  ^'' vnagination  riaiite." 
Everything  is  spoken  of  as  "delicious" — '■'■  delicieuse 
pastorale^'  ^^  deliciense  beaute,"  ^^  delicieuses  sentences," 
'''' delicieuse  theologie  d'a??iour"  Among  the  "tender 
and  delicate  souls  of  the  North  " — it  is  not  quite 
thus  that  Josephus  describes  the  Galileans — was 
set  up  an  ^^  aimable  communisj?ie"  Is  it  possible 
to  imagine  a  more  extravagant  distortion  than  the 
following,  both  in  its  general  effect  and  in  the 
audacious  generalisation  of  a  very  special  incident, 
itself  inaccurately  conceived  of? — 

II  parcourait  ainsi  la  Galilee  au  milieu  dune  fete  per- 
pdtuelle.  II  se  servait  d'une  mule,  monture  en  Orient  si 
bonne  et  si  sfire,  et  dont  le  grand  oeil  noir,  ombrage  de 
longs  cils,  a  beaucoup  de  douceur.  Ses  disciples  de- 
ployaient  quelquefois  autour  de  lui  une  pompe  rustique, 
dont  leurs  vetements,  tenant  lieu  de  tapis,  faisaient  les 
frais.  lis  les  mettaient  sur  la  mule  qui  le  portait,  ou  les 
^tendaicnt  a  tcrrc  sur  son  passage. 


XI  KENAN'S  "  VIE  DE  JESUS  "  199 

History  has  seen  strange  hypotheses ;  but  of  all 
extravagant  notions,  that  one  that  the  world  has  been 
conquered  by  what  was  originally  an  idyllic  gipsying 
party  is  the  most  grotesque.  That  these  '■'■petits 
comites  de  bonnes  gens^^''  though  influenced  by  a  great 
example  and  wakened  out  of  their  "delicious  pas- 
toral" by  a  heroic  death,  should  have  been  able  to 
make  an  impression  on  Judaean  faith,  Greek  intellect, 
and  Roman  civiHsation,  and  to  give  an  impulse  to 
mankind  which  has  lasted  to  this  day,  is  surely  one 
of  the  most  incredible  hypotheses  ever  accepted, 
under  the  desperate  necessity  of  avoiding  an  unwel- 
come alternative. 

M.  Renan  is  willing  to  adopt  everything  in  the 
Gospel  history  except  what  is  miraculous.  If  he  is 
difficult  to  satisfy  as  to  the  physical  possibility  or  the 
proof  of  miracles,  at  least  he  is  not  hard  to  satisfy  on 
points  of  moral  likelihood ;  and  he  draws  on  his 
ample  power  of  supposing  the  combination  of  moral 
opposites  in  order  to  get  rid  of  the  obstinate  and 
refractory  supernatural  miracle.  To  some  extent,  in- 
deed, he  avails  himself  of  that  inexhaustible  resource 
of  unlimited  guessing,  by  means  of  which  he  reverses 
the  whole  history,  and  makes  it  take  a  shape  which 
it  is  hard  to  recognise  in  its  original  records.  The 
feeding  of  the  five  thousand,  the  miracle  described  by 
all  the  four  Evangelists,  is  thus  curtly  disposed  of : — 
"II  se  retira  au  desert.  Beaucoup  de  monde  I'y 
suivit.  Grace  a  une  extrhtie  friigalite  la  troupe  sainte 
y  vecut ;  07i  crut  naturellement  vo\x  en  cela  un  miracle." 


200  KENAN'S  "  VIE  DE  J^SUS  " 


XI 


This  is  all  he  has  to  say.  But  miracles  are  too  closely 
interwoven  with  the  whole  texture  of  the  Gospel  his- 
tory to  be,  as  a  whole,  thus  disposed  of.  He  has,  of 
course,  to  admit  that  miracles  are  so  mixed  up  with 
it  that  mere  exaggeration  is  not  a  sufficient  account 
of  them.  But  he  bids  us  remember  that  the  time 
was  one  of  great  credulity,  of  slackness  and  incapacity 
in  dealing  with  matters  of  evidence,  a  time  when  it 
might  be  said  that  there  was  an  innocent  disregard 
of  exact  and  literal  truth  where  men's  souls  and 
affections  were  deeply  interested.  But,  even  suppos- 
ing that  this  accounted  for  a  belief  in  certain  miracles 
growing  up — which  it  does  not,  for  the  time  was  not 
one  of  mere  childlike  and  uninquiring  belief,  but  was 
as  perfectly  familiar  as  we  are  with  the  notion  of  false 
claims  to  miraculous  power  which  could  not  stand 
examination — still  this  does  not  meet  the  great  diffi- 
culty of  all,  to  which  he  is  at  last  brought.  It  is 
undeniable  that  our  Lord  professed  to  work  miracles. 
They  were  not  merely  attributed  to  Him  by  those 
who  came  after  Him.  If  we  accept  in  any  degree 
the  Gospel  account.  He  not  only  wrought  miracles, 
but  claimed  to  do  so ;  and  M.  Renan  admits  it — that 
is,  he  admits  that  the  highest,  purest,  most  Divine 
person  ever  seen  on  earth  (for  all  this  he  declares  in 
the  most  unqualified  terms)  stooped  to  the  arts  of 
Simon  Magus  or  Apollonius  of  Tyana.  He  was  a 
"  thaumaturge  " — "  tard  et  k  contre-cceur  " — *'  avec 
une  sorte  de  mauvaise  humeur' — "en  cachctte  " — 
"malgre   lui " — "sentant   le   vanite   de   I'opinion  " ; 


XI  KENAN'S  "  VIE  DE  JESUS  "  201 

but  still  a  "thaumaturge."  Moreover,  He  was  so 
almost  of  necessity ;  for  M.  Renan  holds  that  without 
the  support  of  an  alleged  supernatural  character  and 
power,  His  work  must  have  perished.  Everything,  to 
succeed  and  be  realised,  must,  we  are  told,  be  fortified 
with  something  of  alloy.  We  are  reminded  of  the 
"loi  fatale  qui  condamne  I'idee  a  dechoir  des  qu'elle 
cherche  a  convertir  les  hommes."  "Concevoirde 
bien,  en  effet,  ne  suffit  pas ;  il  faut  le  faire  reussir 
parmi  les  hommes.  Pour  cela,  des  voies  moins  pures 
sont  necessaires."  If  the  Great  Teacher  had  kept  to 
the  simplicity  of  His  early  lessons.  He  would  have 
been  greater,  but  "  the  truth  would  not  have  been 
promulgated."  "He  had  to  choose  between  these 
two  alternatives,  either  renouncing  his  mission  or 
becoming  a  'thaumaturge.'"  The  miracles  "were 
a  violence  done  to  him  by  his  age,  a  concession 
which  was  wrung  from  him  by  a  passing  necessity." 
And  if  we  feel  startled  at  such  a  view,  we  are  reminded 
that  we  must  not  measure  the  sincerity  of  Orientals 
by  our  own  rigid  and  critical  idea  of  veracity ;  and 
that  "  such  is  the  weakness  of  the  human  mind,  that 
the  best  causes  are  not  usually  won  but  by  bad 
reasons,"  and  that  the  greatest  of  discoverers  and 
founders  have  only  triumphed  over  their  difficulties 
"  by  daily  taking  account  of  men's  weakness  and  by 
not  always  giving  the  true  reasons  of  the  truth." 

L'histoire  est  impossible  si  Ton  n'admet  hautement 
qu'il  y  a  pour  la  sincerite  plusieurs  mesures.  Toutes  les 
grandes  choses  se  font  par  le  peuple,  or  on  ne  conduit 


202  KENAN'S  "  VIE  DE  JESUS  " 


XI 


pas  le  peiiple  qu'en  se  pretant  k  ses  idees.  Le  philosophe, 
qui  sachant  cela,  s'isole  et  se  retranche  dans  sa  noblesse, 
est  hautement  louable.  Mais  celui  qui  prend  I'humanite 
avec  ses  illusions  et  cherche  h  agir  sur  elle  et  avec  elle, 
ne  saurait  etre  blame.  Cesar  savait  fort  bien  qu'il 
n'etait  pas  fils  de  Venus  ;  la  France  ne  serait  pas  ce 
qu'elle  est  si  Ton  n'avait  cm  mille  ans  h.  la  sainte  ampoule 
de  Reims.  II  nous  est  facile  h  nous  autres,  impuissants 
que  nous  sommes,  d'appeler  cela  mensonge,  et  fiers  de 
notre  timide  honnetete,  de  traiter  avec  dedain  les  heros 
qui  ont  accepte  dans  d'autres  conditions  la  lutte  de  la 
vie.  Ouand  nous  aurons  fait  avec  nos  scrupules  ce  qu'ils 
firent  avec  leurs  mensonges,  nous  aurons  le  droit  d'etre 
pour  eux  severes. 

Now  let  M.  Renan  or  any  one  else  realise  what  is 
involved,  on  his  supposition,  not  merely,  as  he  says, 
of  "illusion  or  madness,"  but  of  wilful  deceit  and 
falsehood,  in  the  history  of  Lazarus,  even  according 
to  his  lame  and  hesitating  attempt  to  soften  it  down 
and  extenuate  it ;  and  then  put  side  by  side  with  it 
the  terms  in  which  M.  Renan  has  summed  up  the 
moral  greatness  of  Him  of  whom  he  writes  : — 

La  foi,  I'enthousiasme,  la  Constance  de  la  premiere 
generation  chretienne  ne  s'expliquent  qu'en  supposant  k 
I'origine  de  tout  le  mouvement  un  homme  de  proportions 
colossales  ....  Cette  sublime  pcrsonne,  qui  chaque 
jour  preside  encore  au  destin  du  monde,  il  est  permis  de 
I'appeler  divine,  non  en  ce  sens  que  Jesus  ait  absorbe 
tout  le  divin,  mais  en  ce  sens  que  Jesus  est  I'individu  qui 
a  fait  faire  h.  son  esp^ce  le  plus  grand  pas  vers  le  divin. 
.   .   .   Au  milieu  de  cette  uniforme  vulgarite,  des  colonncs 


XI  KENAN'S  "  VIE  DE  JESUS  "  203 

s'elevent  vers  le  ciel  et  attestent  une  plus  noble  destinee. 
Jesus  est  la  plus  haute  de  ces  colonnes  qui  montrent  k 
I'homme  d'ou  il  vient  et  ou  il  doit  tendre.  En  lui  s'est 
condense  tout  ce  qu'il  y  a  de  bon  et  d'eleve  dans  notre 
nature.  .  .  Quels  que  puissent  etre  les  phenomenes  in- 
attendus  de  I'avenir,  Jesus  ne  sera  pas  surpasse  .  ,  . 
Tous  les  siecles  proclameront  qu'entre  les  fils  des  homines 
il  n'en  est  pas  ne  de  plus  grand  que  Jesus. 

And  of  such  an  one  we  are  told  that  it  is  a  natural 
and  reasonable  view  to  take,  not  merely  that  He 
claimed  a  direct  communication  with  God,  which 
disordered  reason  could  alone  excuse  Him  for  claiming, 
but  that  He  based  His  whole  mission  on  a  pretension 
to  such  supernatural  powers  as  a  man  could  not 
pretend  to  without  being  conscious  that  they  were 
delusions.  The  conscience  of  that  age  as  to  veracity 
or  imposture  was  quite  clear  on  such  a  point.  Jew 
and  Greek  and  Roman  would  have  condemned  as  a 
deceiver  one  who,  not  having  the  power,  took  on 
him  to  say  that  by  the  finger  of  God  he  could  raise 
the  dead.  And  yet  to  a  conscience  immeasurably 
above  his  age,  it  seems,  according  to  M.  Renan,  that 
this  might  be  done.  It  is  absurd  to  say  that  we 
must  not  judge  such  a  proceeding  by  the  ideas  of 
our  more  exact  and  truth-loving  age,  when  it  would 
have  been  abundantly  condemned  by  the  ideas 
recognised  in  the  religion  and  civilisation  of  the  first 
century. 

M.  Renan  repeatedly  declares  that  his  great  aim 
is  to  save  religion  by  relieving  it  of  the  supernatural. 


204  RENAN'S  "  VIE  DE  JESUS  " 


zi 


He  does  not  argue ;  but  instead  of  the  old  familiar 
view  of  the  Great  History,  he  presents  an  opposite 
theory  of  his  own,  framed  to  suit  that  combination 
of  the  revolutionary  and  the  sentimental  which  just 
now  happens  to  be  in  favour  in  the  unbelieving 
schools.  And  this  is  the  result :  a  representation 
which  boldly  invests  its  ideal  with  the  highest  per- 
fections of  moral  goodness,  strength,  and  beauty,  and 
yet  does  not  shrink  from  associating  with  it  also — 
and  that,  too,  as  the  necessary  and  inevitable  con- 
dition of  success — a  deliberate  and  systematic  willing- 
ness to  delude  and  insensibility  to  untruth.  This  is 
the  religion  and  this  is  the  reason  which  appeals  to 
Christ  in  order  to  condemn  Christianity. 


XII 


RENAN'S  "LES  Ap6tRES"1 


In  his  recent  volume,  Les  Apotres,  M.  Renan  has 
undertaken  two  tasks  of  very  unequal  difficulty.  He 
accounts  for  the  origin  of  the  Christian  belief  and 
religion,  and  he  writes  the  history  of  its  first  pro- 
pagation. These  are  very  different  things,  and  to 
do  one  of  them  is  by  no  means  to  do  the  other.  M. 
Renan's  historical  sketch  of  the  first  steps  of  the 
Christian  movement  is,  whatever  we  may  think  of  its 
completeness  and  soundness,  a  survey  of  characters 
and  facts,  based  on  our  ordinary  experience  of  the 
ways  in  which  men  act  and  are  influenced.  Of  course 
it  opens  questions  and  provokes  dissent  at  every  turn  ; 
but,  after  all,  the  history  of  a  religion  once  introduced 
into  the  world  is  the  history  of  the  men  who  give  it 
shape  and  preach  it,  who  accept  or  oppose  it.  The 
spread  and  development  of  all  religions  have  certain 
broad  features  in  common,  which  admit  of  philo- 
sophical treatment  simply  as  phenomena,  and  receive 

'   Histoire   des    Origines   du    Christianistne.       Livre    II.  — Les 
Apotres.     Par  Ernest  Renan.     Saturday  Review,  14th  July  1866. 


206  KENAN'S  "  LES  APOTRES  "  xii 

light  from  being  compared  with  parallel  examples 
of  the  same  kind ;  and  whether  a  man's  historical 
estimate  is  right,  and  his  picture  accurate  and  true, 
depends  on  his  knowledge  of  the  facts,  and  his  power 
to  understand  them  and  to  make  them  understood. 
No  one  can  dispute  M.  Renan's  qualifications  for 
being  the  historian  of  a  religious  movement.  The 
study  of  religion  as  a  phenomenon  of  human  nature 
and  activity  has  paramount  attractions  for  him.  His 
interest  in  it  has  furnished  him  with  ample  and  varied 
materials  for  comparison  and  generalisation.  He  is 
a  scholar  and  a  man  of  learning,  quick  and  wide  in 
his  sympathies,  and  he  commands  attention  by  the 
singular  charm  of  his  graceful  and  lucid  style.  Wh6n, 
therefore,  he  undertakes  to  relate  how,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  the  Christian  Church  grew  up  amid  the  cir- 
cumstances of  its  first  appearance,  he  has  simply  to 
tell  the  story  of  the  progress  of  a  religious  cause ;  and 
this  is  a  comparatively  light  task  for  him.  But  he 
also  lays  before  us  what  he  appears  to  consider  an 
adequate  account  of  the  origin  of  the  Christian  behef. 
The  Christian  belief,  it  must  be  remembered,  means, 
not  merely  the  belief  that  there  was  such  a  person 
as  he  has  described  in  his  former  volume,  but  the 
belief  that  one  who  was  crucified  rose  again  from  the 
dead,  and  lives  for  evermore  above.  It  is  in  this 
belief  that  the  Christian  religion  had  its  beginning ; 
there  is  no  connecting  Christ  and  Christianity,  except 
through  the  Resurrection.  The  origin,  therefore,  of 
the  belief  in  the  Resurrection,  in  the  shape  in  which 


XII  KENAN'S  "  LES  APOTRES  "  207 

we  have  it,  lies  across  M.  Renan's  path  to  account 
for ;  and  neither  the  picture  which  he  has  drawn  in 
his  former  volume,  nor  the  history  which  he  follows 
out  in  this,  dispense  him  from  the  necessity  of  facing 
this  essential  and  paramount  element  in  the  problem 
which  he  has  to  solve.  He  attempts  to  deal  with 
this,  the  knot  of  the  great  question.  But  his  attempt 
seems  to  us  to  disclose  a  more  extraordinary  in- 
sensibihty  to  the  real  demands  of  the  case,  and  to 
what  we  cannot  help  calling  the  pitiable  inadequacy 
of  his  own  explanation,  than  we  could  have  conceived 
possible  in  so  keen  and  practised  a  mind. 

The  Resurrection,  we  repeat,  bars  the  way  in  M. 
Renan's  scheme  for  making  an  intelligible  transition, 
from  the  life  and  character  which  he  has  sought  to 
reproduce  from  the  Gospels,  to  the  first  beginnings  and 
preaching  of  Christianity.  The  Teacher,  he  says,  is 
unique  in  wisdom,  in  goodness,  in  the  height  of  his 
own  moral  stature  and  the  Divine  elevation  of  his 
aims.  The  religion  is,  with  all  abatements  and 
imperfections,  the  only  one  known  which  could  be 
the  religion  of  humanity.  After  his  portraiture  of 
the  Teacher,  follows,  naturally  enough,  as  the  result 
of  that  Teacher's  influence  and  life,  a  religion  of 
corresponding  elevation  and  promise.  The  passage 
from  a  teaching  such  as  M.  Renan  supposes  to  a 
religion  such  as  he  allows  Christianity  to  be  may  be 
reasonably  understood  as  a  natural  consequence  of 
well-known  causes,  but  for  one  thing — the  inter- 
position between  the  two  of  an  alleged  event  which 


208  KENAN'S  "  LES  APOTRES  " 


ZII 


simply  throws  out  all  reasonings  drawn  from  ordinary 
human  experience.  From  the  teaching  and  life  of 
Socrates  follow,  naturally  enough,  schools  of  philo- 
sophy, and  an  impulse  which  has  affected  scientific 
thought  ever  since.  From  the  preaching  and  life  of 
Mahomet  follows,  equally  naturally,  the  religion  of 
Islam.  In  each  case  the  result  is  seen  to  be  directly 
and  distinctly  linked  on  to  the  influences  which  gave 
it  birth,  and  nothing  more  than  these  influences  is 
wanted,  or  makes  any  claim,  to  account  for  it.  So 
M.  Renan  holds  that  all  that  is  needed  to  account  for 
Christianity  is  such  a  personality  and  such  a  career 
as  he  has  described  in  his  last  volume.  But  the 
facts  will  not  bend  to  this.  Christianity  hangs  on 
to  Christ  not  merely  as  to  a  Person  who  lived  and 
taught  and  died,  but  as  to  a  Person  who  rose  again 
from  death.  That  is  of  the  very  essence  of  its 
alleged  derivation  from  Christ.  It  knows  Christ  only 
as  Christ  risen ;  the  only  reason  of  its  own  existence 
that  it  recognises  is  the  Resurrection.  The  only 
claim  the  Apostles  set  forth  for  preaching  to  the 
world  is  that  their  Master  who  was  crucified  was  alive 
once  more.  Every  one  knows  that  this  was  the 
burden  of  all  their  words,  the  corner-stone  of  all  their 
work.  We  may  believe  them  or  not.  We  may  take 
Christianity  or  leave  it.  But  we  cannot  derive 
Christianity  from  Christ,  without  meeting,  as  the 
bond  which  connects  the  two,  the  Resurrection. 
But  for  the  Resurrection,  M.  Renan's  scheme  might 
be  intelligible.     A  Teacher  unequalled  for  singleness 


XII  KENAN'S  '•  LES  APOTRES"  209 

of  aim  and  nobleness  of  purpose  lives  and  dies,  and 
leaves  the  memory  and  the  leaven  of  His  teaching  to 
disciples,  who  by  them,  even  though  in  an  ill-under- 
stood shape,  and  with  incomparably  inferior  qualities 
themselves,  purify  and  elevate  the  religious  ideas 
and  feelings  of  mankind.  If  that  were  all,  if  there 
were  nothing  but  the  common  halo  of  the  miraculous 
which  is  apt  to  gather  about  great  names,  the  inter- 
pretation might  be  said  to  be  coherent.  But  a 
theory  of  Christianity  cannot  neglect  the  most  pro- 
minent fact  connected  with  its  beginning.  It  is 
impossible  to  leave  it  out  of  the  account,  in  judging 
both  of  the  Founder  and  of  those  whom  his  influence 
moulded  and  inspired. 

M.  Renan  has  to  account  for  the  prominence  given 
to  the  Resurrection  in  the  earliest  Christian  teaching, 
without  having  recourse  to  the  supposition  of  con- 
scious imposture  and  a  deliberate  conspiracy  to  de- 
ceive ;  for  such  a  supposition  would  not  harmonise 
either  with  the  portrait  he  has  drawn  of  the  Master, 
or  with  his  judgment  of  the  seriousness  and  moral 
elevation  of  the  men  who,  immeasurably  inferior  as 
they  were  to  Him,  imbibed  His  spirit,  and  represented 
and  transmitted  to  us  His  principles.  And  this  is 
something  much  more  than  can  be  accounted  for  by 
the  general  disposition  of  the  age  to  assume  the 
supernatural  and  the  miraculous.  The  way  in  which 
the  Resurrection  is  circumstantially  and  unceasingly 
asserted,  and  made  on  every  occasion  and  from  the 
first  the  foundation  of  everything,  is  something  very 

VOL.  II  P 


210  RENAN'S  "  LES  APOTRES  "  xii 

different  from  the  vague  legends  which  float  about  of 
kings  or  saints  whom  death  has  spared,  or  from  a 
readiness  to  see  the  direct  agency  of  heaven  in  health 
or  disease.  It  is  too  precise,  too  matter-of-fact,  too 
prosaic  in  the  way  in  which  it  is  told,  to  be  resolved 
into  ill-understood  dreams  and  imaginations.  The 
various  recitals  show  little  care  to  satisfy  our  curiosity, 
or  to  avoid  the  appearance  of  inconsistency  in  detail ; 
but  nothing  can  be  more  removed  from  vagueness  and 
hesitation  than  their  definite  positive  statements.  It 
is  with  them  that  the  writer  on  Christianity  has  to  deal. 
M.  Renan's  method  is — whilst  of  course  not  be- 
lieving them,  yet  not  supposing  conscious  fraud — to 
treat  these  records  as  the  description  of  natural,  un- 
sought visions  on  the  part  of  people  who  meant  no 
harm,  but  who  believed  what  they  wished  to  believe. 
They  are  the  story  of  a  great  mistake,  but  a  mistake 
proceeding  simply,  in  the  most  natural  way  in  the 
world,  from  excess  of  "idealism"  and  attachment. 
Unaffected  by  the  circumstance  that  there  never 
were  narratives  less  ideal,  and  more  straightfor- 
wardly real — that  they  seem  purposely  framed  to 
be  a  contrast  to  professed  accounts  of  visions, 
and  to  exclude  the  possibility  of  their  being  con- 
founded with  such  accounts ;  and  that  the  alleged 
numbers  who  saw,  the  alleged  frequency  and  re- 
petition and  variation  of  the  instances,  and  the 
alleged  time  over  which  the  appearances  extended, 
and  after  which  they  absolutely  ceased,  make  the 
hypothesis  of  involuntary  and  undesigned  allusions  of 


XII  RENAN'S  "  LES  APOTRES  "  211 

regret  and  passion  infinitely  different  from  what  it 
might  be  in  the  case  of  one  or  two  persons,  or  for  a 
transitory  period  of  excitement  and  crisis — unaffected 
by  such  considerations,  M.  Renan  proceeds  to  tell,  in 
his  own  way,  the  story  of  what  he  supposes  to  have 
occurred,  without,  of  course,  admitting  the  smallest 
real  foundation  for  what  was  so  positively  asserted, 
but  with  very  little  reproach  or  discredit  to  the  ardent 
and  undoubting  assertors.  He  begins  with  a  state- 
ment which  is  meant  to  save  the  character  of  the 
Teacher.  "Jesus,  though  he  spoke  unceasingly  of 
resurrection,  of  new  life,  had  never  said  quite  clearly 
that  he  should  rise  again  in  the  flesh."  He  says  this 
with  the  texts  before  him,  for  he  quotes  them  and 
classifies  them  in  a  note.  But  this  is  his  point  of 
departure,  laid  down  without  qualification.  Yet  if 
there  is  anything  which  the  existing  records  do  say 
distinctly,  it  is  that  Jesus  Christ  said  over  and  over 
again  that  He  should  rise  again,  and  that  He  fixed  the 
time  within  which  He  should  rise.  M.  Renan  is  not 
bound  to  believe  them.  But  he  must  take  them  as 
he  finds  them ;  and  on  this  capital  point  either  we 
know  nothing  at  all,  and  have  no  evidence  to  go  upon, 
or  the  evidence  is  simply  inverted  by  M.  Renan's 
assertion.  There  may,  of  course,  be  reasons  for  be- 
lieving one  part  of  a  man's  evidence  and  disbelieving 
another ;  but  there  is  nothing  in  this  case  but  incom- 
patibility with  a  theory  to  make  this  part  of  the 
evidence  either  more  or  less  worthy  of  credit  than 
any  other  part.     What  is  certain  is  that  it  is  in  the- 


212  RENAN'S  "  LES  APOTRES  "  xii 

last  degree  weak  and  uncritical  to  lay  down,  as  the 
foundation  and  first  pre-requisite  of  an  historical  view, 
a  position  which  the  records  on  which  the  view  pro- 
fesses to  be  based  emphatically  and  unambiguously 
contradict.  Whatever  we  may  think  of  it,  the  evi- 
dence undoubtedly  is,  if  evidence  there  is  at  all,  that 
Jesus  Christ  did  say,  though  He  could  not  get  His 
disciples  at  the  time  to  understand  and  beUeve  Him, 
that  He  should  rise  again  on  the  third  day.  What  M. 
Renan  had  to  do,  if  he  thought  the  contrary,  was  not 
to  assume,  but  to  prove,  that  in  these  repeated 
instances  in  which  they  report  His  announcements, 
the  Evangelists  mistook  or  misquoted  the  words  of 
their  Master. 

He  accepts,  however,  their  statement  that  no  one 
at  first  hoped  that  the  words  would  be  made  good ; 
and  he  proceeds  to  account  for  the  extraordinary 
belief  which,  in  spite  of  this  original  incredulity,  grew 
up,  and  changed  the  course  of  things  and  the  face  of 
the  world.  We  admire  and  respect  many  things  in 
M.  Renan ;  but  it  seems  to  us  that  his  treatment  of 
this  matter  is  simply  the  7ie  plus  ultra  of  the  degrada- 
tion of  the  greatest  of  issues  by  the  application  to  it 
of  sentiment  unworthy  of  a  silly  novel.  In  the  first 
place,  he  lays  down  on  general  grounds  that,  though 
the  disciples  had  confessedly  given  up  all  hope,  it  yet 
was  natural  that  they  should  expect  to  see  their  master 
alive  again.  "  Mais  I'enthousiasme  et  I'amour  ne  con- 
naissent  pas  les  situations  sans  issue."  Do  they  not  ? 
Are  death  and  separation  such  light  things  to  triumph 


XII  RENAN'S  "  LES  APOTRES  "  213 

over  that  imagination  finds  it  easy  to  cheat  them  ? 
"  lis  se  jouent  de  I'impossible  et,  plutot  que  d'abdi- 
quer  I'esperance,  ils  font  violence  a  toute  realite." 
Is  this  an  account  of  the  world  of  fact  or  the  world  of 
romance  ?  The  disciples  did  not  hope ;  but,  says  M. 
Renan,  vague  words  about  the  future  had  dropped 
from  their  master,  and  these  were  enough  to  build  upon, 
and  to  suggest  that  they  would  soon  see  him  back. 
In  vain  it  is  said  that  in  fact  they  did  not  expect  it. 
"Une  telle  croyance  etait  d'ailleurs  si  naturelle,  que 
la  foi  des  disciples  aurait  suffi  pour  la  creer  de  toutes 
pieces."  Was  it  indeed — in  spite  of  Enoch  and 
Elias,  cases  of  an  entirely  different  kind — so  natural 
to  think  that  the  ruined  leader  of  a  crushed  cause, 
whose  hopeless  followers  had  seen  the  last  of  him 
amid  the  lowest  miseries  of  torment  and  scorn,  should 
burst  the  grave  ? 

II  devait  arriver  [he  proceeds]  pour  Jesus  ce  qui 
arrive  pour  tous  les  hommes  qui  ont  captive  I'attention 
de  leurs  semblables.  Le  monde,  habitue  k  leur  attribuer 
des  vertus  surhumaines,  ne  peut  admettre  qu'ils  aient 
subi  la  loi  injuste,  revoltante,  inique,  du  trepas  commun. 
.  .  .  La  mort  est  chose  si  absurde  quand  elle  frappe 
I'homme  de  genie  ou  I'homme  d'un  grand  cceur,  que  le 
peuple  ne  croit  pas  a  la  possibilite  d'une  telle  erreur  de 
la  nature.      Les  heros  ne  meurent  pas. 

The  history  of  the  world  presents  a  large  range  of 
instances  to  test  the  singular  assertion  that  death  is 
so  "  absurd  "  that  "  the  people  "  cannot  believe  that 


2U  RENAN'S  "  LES  ArOTRES  "  xii 

great  and  good  men  literally  die.  But  would  it  be 
easy  to  match  the  strangeness  of  a  philosopher  and  a 
man  of  genius  gravely  writing  this  down  as  a  reason — 
not  why,  at  the  interval  of  centuries,  a  delusion  should 
grow  up — but  why,  on  the  very  morrow  of  a  crucifixion 
and  burial,  the  disciples  should  have  believed  that  all 
the  dreadful  work  they  had  seen  a  day  or  two  before 
was  in  very  fact  and  reality  reversed  ?  We  confess  we 
do  not  know  what  human  experience  is  if  it  counten- 
ances such  a  supposition  as  this. 

From  this  antecedent  probability  he  proceeds  to  the 
facts.  "  The  Sabbath  day  which  followed  the  burial 
was  occupied  with  these  thoughts.  .  .  .  Never  was 
the  rest  of  the  Sabbath  so  fruitful."  They  all,  the 
women  especially,  thought  of  him  all  day  long  in  his 
bed  of  spices,  watched  over  by  angels ;  and  the  assur- 
ance grew  that  the  wicked  men  who  had  killed  him 
would  not  have  their  triumph,  that  he  would  not  be 
left  to  decay,  that  he  would  be  wafted  on  high  to  that 
Kingdom  of  the  Father  of  which  he  had  spoken. 
"  Nous  le  verrons  encore ;  nous  entendrons  sa  voix 
charmante ;  c'est  en  vain  qu'ils  I'auront  tue."  And 
as,  with  the  Jews,  a  future  life  implied  a  resurrection 
of  the  body,  the  shape  which  their  hope  took  was 
settled.  "  Reconnaitre  que  la  mort  pouvait  etre  vic- 
torieuse  de  J^sus,  de  celui  qui  venait  de  supprimer 
son  empire,  c'etait  le  comble  de  I'absurdite."  It  is, 
we  suppose,  irrelevant  to  remark  that  we  find  not  the 
faintest  trace  of  this  sense  of  absurdity.  The  dis- 
ciples, he  says,  had  no  choice  between  hopelessness 


XII  RENAN'S  "LES  APOTRES "  215 

and  "an  heroic  afifirmation " ;  and  he  makes  the 
bold  surmise  that  "  un  homme  penetrant  aurait  pu  an- 
noncer  dh  le  sajnedi  que  Jesus  revivrait."  This  may  be 
history,  or  philosophy,  or  criticism ;  what  it  is  not  is 
the  inference  naturally  arising  from  the  only  records 
we  have  of  the  time  spoken  of.  But  the  force  of 
historical  imagination  dispenses  with  the  necessity  of 
extrinsic  support.  "  La  petite  societe  chretienne,.  ce 
jour-la,  opera  le  veritable  miracle  :  elle  ressuscita  Jesus 
en  son  coeur  par  I'amour  intense  qu'elle  lui  porta. 
Elle  decida  que  Jesus  ne  mourrait  pas."  The  Chris- 
tian Church  has  done  many  remarkable  things ;  but 
it  never  did  anything  so  strange,  or  which  so  showed 
its  power,  as  when  it  took  that  resolution. 

How  was  the  decision,  involuntary  and  uncon- 
scious, and  guiltless  of  intentional  deception,  if  we 
can  conceive  of  such  an  attitude  of  mind,  carried  out  ? 
M.  Renan  might  leave  the  matter  in  obscurity.  But 
he  sees  his  way,  in  spite  of  incoherent  traditions  and 
the  contradictions  which  they  present,  to  a  "  sufficient 
degree  of  probability."  The  belief  in  the  Resurrec- 
tion originated  in  an  hallucination  of  the  disordered 
fancy  of  Mary  Magdalen,  whose  mind  was  thrown  off 
its  balance  by  her  affection  and  sorrow ;  and,  once 
suggested,  the  idea  rapidly  spread,  and  produced, 
through  the  Christian  society,  a  series  of  correspond- 
ing visions,  firmly  believed  to  be  real.  But  Mary 
Magdalen  was  the  founder  of  it  all : — 

Elle  eut,  en  ce  moment  solennel,  une  part  d'action  tout 
a  fait  hors  ligne.      C'est  elle  qu'il  faut  suivre  pas  k  pas; 


216  KENAN'S  "  LES  ArOTRES  "  xii 

car  cllc  porta,  ce  jour-lh,  pendant  une  hcurc,  tout  le 
travail  de  la  conscience  chretienne ;  son  temoignage 
decida  la  foi  de  I'avenir.  ...  La  vision  leg^re  s'ecarte 
et  lui  dit :  "  Ne  me  touche  pas  ! "  Peu  h  peu  I'ombre 
disparait.  Mais  le  miracle  de  I'amour  est  accompli.  Ce 
que  Cephas  n'a  pu  faire,  Marie  I'a  faite  ;  elle  a  su  tirer  la 
vie,  la  parole  douce  et  penetrante,  du  tombeau  vide.  II 
ne  s'agit  plus  de  consequences  h  deduire  ni  de  conjectures 
k  former,  Marie  a  vu  et  entendu.  La  resurrection  a 
son  premier  temoin  immediat. 

He  proceeds  to  criticise  the  accounts  which  ascribe 
the  first  vision  to  others ;  but  in  reality  Mary  ]\Iag- 
dalen,  he  says,  has  done  most,  after  the  great  Teacher, 
for  the  foundation  of  Christianity.  "  Queen  and 
patroness  of  idealists,'*  she  was  able  to  "impose  upon 
all  the  sacred  vision  of  her  impassioned  soul."  All 
rests  upon  her  first  burst  of  enthusiasm,  which  gave 
the  signal  and  kindled  the  faith  of  others.  "Sa 
grande  affirmation  de  femme,  'il  est  ressuscite,'  a  ete 
la  base  de  la  foi  de  I'humanite  "  : — 

Paul  ne  parle  pas  de  la  vision  de  Marie  et  reporte 
tout  I'honneur  de  la  premiere  apparition  sur  Pierre.  Mais 
cette  expression  est  tr^s-inexacte.  Pierre  ne  vit  que  le 
caveau  vide,  le  suaire  et  le  linccul.  Marie  seule  aima 
assez  pour  depasser  la  nature  et  faire  revivre  le  fantome 
du  maitre  exquis.  Dans  ces  sortes  de  crises  merveilleuses, 
voir  apres  les  autres  n'est  rien  ;  tout  le  merite  est  de  voir 
pour  la  premiere  fois;  car  les  autres  modelent  ensuite  leur 
vision  sur  le  type  regu.  C'est  le  proprc  des  belles 
organisations   de    concevoir  I'image    promptcmcnt,  avec 


XII  KENAN'S  "  LES  APOTRES  "  217 

justesse  et  par  une  sorte  de  sens  intime  du  dessin.  La 
gloire  de  la  resurrection  appartient  done  k  Marie  de 
Magdala.  Apr^s  Jesus,  c'est  Marie  qui  a  le  plus  fait  pour 
la  fondation  du  Christianisme.  L'ombre  creee  par  les 
sens  delicats  de  Madeleine  plane  encore  sur  le  monde.  .  .  . 
Loin  d'ici,  raison  impuissante  !  Ne  va  pas  appliquer  une 
froide  analyse  k  ce  chef-d'oeuvre  de  Pidealisme  et  de 
I'amour.  Si  la  sagesse  renonce  k  consoler  cette  pauvre 
race  humaine,  trahie  par  le  sort,  laisse  la  folie  tenter 
I'aventure.  Ou  est  le  sage  qui  a  donne  au  monde  autant 
de  joie,  que  la  possedee  Marie  de  Magdala  ? 

He  proceeds  to  describe,  on  the  same  supposition, 
the  other  events  of  the  day,  which  he  accepts  as 
having  in  a  certain  very  important  sense  happened, 
though,  of  course,  only  in  the  sense  which  excludes 
their  reality.  No  doubt,  for  a  series  of  hallucinations, 
anything  will  do  in  the  way  of  explanation.  The 
scene  of  the  evening  was  really  believed  to  have  taken 
place  as  described,  though  it  was  the  mere  product  of 
chance  noises  and  breaths  of  air  on  minds  intently 
expectant ;  and  we  are  bidden  to  remember  "  that  in 
these  decisive  hours  a  current  of  wind,  a  creaking 
window,  an  accidental  rustle,  settle  the  behef  of 
nations  for  centuries."  But  at  any  rate  it  was  a 
decisive  hour  : — 

Tels  furent  les  incidents  de  ce  jour  qui  a  fixe  le  sort 
de  I'humanite.  L'opinion  que  Jesus  etait  ressuscite  s'y 
fonda  d'une  maniere  irrevocable.  La  secte,  qu'on  avait 
cru  eteindre  en  tuant  le  maitre,  fut  des  lors  assuree  d'un 
immense  avenir. 


218  KENAN'S  "  LES  APOTRES  "  xii 

We  are  willing  to  admit  that  Christian  writers  have 
often  spoken  unreally  and  unsatisfactorily  enough  in 
their  comments  on  this  subject.  But  what  Christian 
comment,  hard,  rigid,  and  narrow  in  its  view  of 
possibilities,  ever  equalled  this  in  its  baselessness  and 
supreme  absence  of  all  that  makes  a  view  look  like 
the  truth  ?  It  puts  the  most  extravagant  strain  on 
documents  which,  truly  or  falsely,  but  at  any  rate 
in  the  most  consistent  and  uniform  manner,  assert 
something  different.  What  they  assert  in  every  con- 
ceivable form,  and  with  distinct  detail,  are  facts  ;  it 
is  not  criticism,  but  mere  arbitrary  license,  to  say  that 
all  these  stand  for  visions.  The  issue  of  truth  or 
falsehood  is  intelligible  ;  the  middle  supposition  of 
confusion  and  mistake  in  that  which  is  the  basis  of 
everything,  and  is  definitely  and  in  such  varied  ways 
repeated,  is  trifling  and  incredible.  We  may  dis- 
believe, if  we  please,  St  Paul's  enumeration  of  the 
appearances  after  the  Resurrection  ;  but  to  resolve  it 
into  a  scries  of  visions  is  to  take  refuge  in  the  most 
unlikely  of  guesses.  And,  when  we  take  into  view 
the  whole  of  the  case — not  merely  the  life  and 
teaching  out  of  which  everything  grew,  but  the  aim 
and  character  of  the  movement  which  ensued,  and 
the  consequences  of  it,  long  tested  and  still  con- 
tinuing, to  the  history  and  development  of  mankind 
— we  find  it  hard  to  measure  the  estimate  of  probability 
which  is  satisfied  with  the  supposition  that  the 
incidents  of  one  day  of  folly  and  delusion  irrevocably 
decided  the  belief  of  ages,  and  the  life  and  destiny  of 


XII  KENAN'S  "  LES  APOTRES  "  219 

millions.  Without  the  belief  in  the  Resurrection  there 
would  have  been  no  Christianity  ;  if  anything  may  be 
laid  down  as  certain,  this  may.  We  should  probably 
never  have  even  heard  of  the  great  Teacher ;  He 
would  not  have  been  believed  in,  He  would  not  have 
been  preached  to  the  world;  the  impulse  to  conversion 
would  have  been  wanting ;  and  all  that  was  without 
parallel  good  and  true  and  fruitful  in  His  life  would 
have  perished,  and  have  been  lost  in  Judaea.  And 
the  belief  in  the  Resurrection  M.  Renan  thinks  due 
to  an  hour  of  over-excited  fancy  in  a  woman  agonized 
by  sorrow  and  affection.  When  we  are  presented  with 
an  hypothesis  on  the  basis  of  intrinsic  probability,  we 
cannot  but  remember  that  the  power  of  delusion  and 
self-deception,  though  undoubtedly  shown  in  very  re- 
markable instances,  must  yet  be  in  a  certain  propor- 
tion to  what  it  originates  and  produces,  and  that  it  is 
controlled  by  the  numerous  antagonistic  influences  of 
the  world.  Crazy  women  have  founded  superstitions ; 
but  we  cannot  help  thinking  that  it  would  be  more 
difficult  than  M.  Renan  supposes  for  crazy  women  to 
found  a  world-wide  religion  for  ages,  branching  forth 
into  infinite  forms,  and  tested  by  its  application  to 
all  varieties  of  civilisation,  and  to  national  and  per- 
sonal character.  M.  Renan  points  to  La  Salette. 
But  the  assumption  would  be  a  bold  one  that  the  La 
Salette  people  could  have  invented  a  religion  for 
Christendom  which  would  stand  the  wear  of  eighteen 
centuries,  and  satisfy  such  different  minds.  Pious 
frauds,  as  he  says,  may  have  built  cathedrals.     But 


220  KENAN'S  "  LES  APOTRES  "  xii 

you  must  take  Christianity  for  what  it  has  proved  itself 
to  be  in  its  hard  and  unexampled  trial.  To  start  an 
order,  a  sect,  an  institution,  even  a  local  tradition  or 
local  set  of  miracles,  on  foundations  already  laid,  is 
one  thing  ;  it  is  not  the  same  to  be  the  spring  of  the 
most  serious  and  the  deepest  of  moral  movements  for 
the  improvement  of  the  world,  the  most  unpretending 
and  the  most  careless  of  all  outward  form  and  show,  the 
most  severely  searching  and  universal  and  lasting  in  its 
effects  on  mankind.  To  trace  that  back  to  the  Teacher 
without  the  intervention  of  the  belief  in  the  Resurrec- 
tion is  manifestly  impossible.  We  know  what  He  is  said 
to  have  taught;  we  know  what  has  come  of  that  teaching 
in  the  world  at  large;  but  if  the  link  which  connects  the 
two  be  not  a  real  one,  it  is  vain  to  explain  it  by  the 
dreams  of  affection.  It  was  not  a  matter  of  a  moment 
or  an  hour,  but  of  days  and  weeks  continually ;  not 
the  assertion  of  one  imaginative  mourner  or  two,  but 
of  a  numerous  and  variously  constituted  body  of 
people.  The  story,  if  it  was  not  true,  was  not 
delusion,  but  imposture.  We  certainly  cannot  be 
said  to  know  much  of  what  happens  in  the  genesis  of 
religions.  But  that  between  such  a  teacher  and  such 
teaching  there  should  intervene  such  a  gigantic  false- 
hood, whether  imposture  or  delusion,  is  unquestion- 
ably one  of  the  hardest  violations  of  probability 
conceivable,  as  well  as  one  of  the  most  desperate 
conclusions  as  regards  the  capacity  of  mankind  for 
truth.  Few  thoughts  can  be  less  endurable  than  that 
the  wisest  and  best  of  our  race,  men  of  the  soberest 


XII  KENAN'S  "  LES  APOTRES  "  221 

and  most  serious  tempers,  and  most  candid  and 
judicial  minds,  should  have  been  the  victims  and 
dupes  of  the  mad  affection  of  a  crazy  Magdalen, 
of  "ces  touchantes  demoniaques,  ces  pecheresses 
converties,  ces  vraies  fondatrices  du  Christianisme." 
M.  Renan  shrinks  from  solving  such  a  question  by 
the  hypothesis  of  conscious  fraud.  To  solve  it  by 
sentiment  is  hardly  more  respectful  either  to  the 
world  or  to  truth. 

We  have  left  ourselves  no  room  to  speak  of  the 
best  part  of  M.  Renan 's  new  volume,  his  historical 
comment  on  the  first  period  of  Christianity.  We  do 
not  pretend  to  go  along  with  him  in  his  general 
principles  of  judgment,  or  in  many  of  his  most 
important  historical  conclusions.  But  here  he  is, 
what  he  is  not  in  the  early  chapters,  on  ground  where 
his  critical  faculty  comes  fairly  into  play.  He  is,  we 
think,  continually  paradoxical  and  reckless  in  his 
statements  ;  and  his  book  is  more  thickly  strewn  than 
almost  any  we  know  with  half-truths,  broad  axioms 
which  require  much  paring  down  to  be  of  any  use, 
but  which  are  made  by  him  to  do  duty  for  want  of 
something  stronger.  But,  from  so  keen  and  so 
deeply  interested  a  writer,  it  is  our  own  fault  if  we  do 
not  learn  a  good  deal.  And  we  may  study  in  its  full 
development  that  curious  combination,  of  which  M. 
Renan  is  the  most  conspicuous  example,  of  profound 
veneration  for  Christianity  and  sympathy  with  its 
most  characteristic  aspects,  with  the  scientific  impulse 
to  destroy  in  the  public  mind  the  belief  in  its  truth. 


XIII 

M.  KENAN'S  HIBBERT  LECTURES^ 


The  object  of  M.  Kenan's  lectures  at  St.  George's 
Hall  is,  as  we  understand  him,  not  merely  to  present 
a  historical  sketch  of  the  influence  of  Rome  on  the 
early  Church,  but  to  reconcile  the  historical  imagina- 
tion with  the  results  of  his  own  and  kindred  specula- 
tions on  the  origin  of  Christianity.  He  has,  with  a 
good  faith  which  we  do  not  question,  investigated  the 
subject  and  formed  his  conclusions  upon  it.  He  on 
the  present  occasion  assumes  these  investigations, 
and  that  he,  at  any  rate,  is  satisfied  with  their  result. 
He  hardly  pretends  to  carry  the  mixed  popular 
audience  whom  he  addresses  into  any  real  inquiry 
into  the  grounds  on  which  he  has  satisfied  himself 
that  the  received  account  of  Christianity  is  not  the 
true  one.  But  he  is  aware  that  all  minds  are  more 
or  less  consciously  impressed  with  the  broad  diffi- 
culty that,  after  all  attempts  to  trace  the  origin  of 

^  Guardian,  14th  April  1880. 


XIII  RENAN'S  HIBBERT  LECTURES  223 

Christianity  to  agencies  and  influences  of  well-under- 
stood human  character,  the  disproportion  between 
causes  and  effects  still  continues  to  appear  excessive. 
The  great  Christian  tradition  with  its  definite  beliefs 
about  the  conditions  of  man's  existence,  which  has 
shaped  the  fortunes  and  determined  the  future  of 
mankind  on  earth,  is  in  possession  of  the  world  as 
much  as  the  great  tradition  of  right  and  wrong,  or  of 
the  family,  or  of  the  State.  How  did  it  get  there  ? 
It  is  most  astonishing  that  it  should  have  done  so ; 
what  is  the  account  of  it?  Of  course  people  may 
inquire  into  this  question  as  they  may  inquire  into 
the  basis  of  morality,  or  the  origin  of  the  family  or 
the  State.  But  here,  as  on  those  subjects,  reason, 
and  that  imagination  which  is  one  of  the  forces  of 
reason,  by  making  the  mind  duly  sensible  of  the 
magnitude  of  ideas  and  alternatives,  are  exacting. 
M.  Renan's  task  is  to  make  the  purely  human  origin 
of  Christianity,  its  origin  in  the  circumstances,  the 
beliefs,  the  ideas,  and  the  moral  and  political  condi- 
tions of  the  first  centuries,  seem  to  us  natural — as 
natural  in  the  history  of  the  world  as  other  great  and 
surprising  events  and  changes  —  as  natural  as  the 
growth  and  the  fall  of  the  Roman  Empire,  or  as  the 
Reformation,  or  the  French  Revolution.  He  is  well 
qualified  to  sound  the  depths  of  his  undertaking  and 
to  meet  its  heavy  exigencies.  With  a  fuller  know- 
ledge of  books,  and  a  closer  familiarity  than  most 
men  with  the  thoughts  and  the  events  of  the  early 
ages,  with  a  serious  value  for  the  idea  of  religion  as 


224  KENAN'S  HIBBERT  LECTURES  xiii 

such,  and  certainly  with  no  feeble  powers  of  recalling 
the  past  and  investing  it  with  colour  and  life,  he  has 
to  show  how  these  things  can  be — how  a  religion 
w4th  such  attributes  as  he  freely  ascribes  to  the 
Gospel,  so  grand,  so  pure,  so  lasting,  can  have  sprung 
up  not  merely  (71  but  from  a  most  corrupt  and  im- 
moral time,  and  can  have  its  root  in  the  most  porten- 
tous and  impossible  of  falsehoods.  It  must  be  said 
to  be  a  bold  undertaking. 

M.  Renan  has  always  aimed  at  doing  justice  to 
what  he  assailed ;  Christians,  who  realise  w^hat  they 
believe,  will  say  that  he  patronises  their  religion, 
and  naturally  they  resent  such  patronage.  Such 
candour  adds  doubtless  to  the  literary  effect  of 
his  method ;  but  it  is  only  due  to  him  to  acknow- 
ledge the  fairness  of  his  admissions.  He  starts 
with  the  declaration  that  there  never  was  a  nobler 
moment  in  human  history  than  the  beginnings 
of  the  Christian  Church.  It  w^as  the  "most  heroic 
episode  in  the  annals  of  mankind."  "Never  did 
man  draw  forth  from  his  bosom  more  devotion, 
more  love  of  the  ideal,  than  in  the  150  years 
which  elapsed  between  the  sweet  Galilean  vision 
and  the  death  of  Marcus  Aurelius."  It  was  not 
only  that  the  saints  were  admirable  and  beautiful 
in  their  lives ;  they  had  the  secret  of  the  future,  and 
laid  down  the  lines  on  which  the  goodness  and  hope 
of  the  coming  world  were  to  move.  "  Never  was  the 
religious  conscience  more  eminently  creative,  never  did 
it  lay  down  with  more  authority  the  law  of  future  ages." 


XIII  KENAN'S  HIBBERT  LECTURES  225 

Now,  if  this  is  not  mere  rhetoric,  what  does  it 
come  to  ?  It  means  not  merely  that  there  was  here 
a  phenomenon,  not  only  extraordinary  but  unique, 
in  the  development  of  human  character,  but  that 
here  was  created  or  evolved  what  was  to  guide  and 
form  the  religious  ideas  of  mankind ;  here  were  the 
springs  of  what  has  reached  through  all  the  ages  of 
expanding  humanity  to  our  own  days,  of  what  is  best 
and  truest  and  deepest  and  holiest.  M.  Renan,  at 
any  rate,  does  not  think  this  an  illusion  of  Christian 
prepossessions,  a  fancy  picture  of  a  mythic  age  of 
gold,  of  an  unhistorical  period  of  pure  and  primitive 
antiquity.  Put  this  view  of  things  by  the  side  of  any 
of  the  records  or  the  literature  of  the  time  remaining 
to  us ;  if  not  St.  Paul's  Epistles  nor  Tacitus  nor 
Lucian,  then  Virgil  and  Horace  and  Cicero,  or  Seneca 
or  Epictetus  or  Marcus  Aurelius.  Is  it  possible  by 
any  effort  of  imagination  to  body  forth  the  links 
which  can  solidly  connect  the  ideas  which  live  and 
work  and  grow  on  one  side,  with  the  ideas  which  are 
represented  by  the  facts  and  principles  of  the  other 
side  ?  Or  is  it  any  more  possible  to  connect  what  we 
know  of  Christian  ideas  and  convictions  by  a  bond  of 
natural  and  intelligible,  if  not  necessary  derivation, 
with  what  we  know  of  Jewish  ideas  and  Jewish  habits 
of  thought  at  the  time  in  question  ?  Yet  that  is  the 
thing  to  be  done,  to  be  done  rigorously,  to  be  done 
clearly  and  distinctly,  by  those  who  are  satisfied  to 
find  the  impulses  and  faith  which  gave  birth  to 
Christianity  amid  the  seething  confusions  of  the  time 

VOL.  II  Q 


226  KENAN'S  HIRBERT  LECTURES  xiii 

which  saw  its  beginning;  absolutely  identical  with 
those  wild  movements  in  origin  and  nature,  and  only 
by  a  strange,  fortunate  accident  immeasurably  superior 
to  them. 

This  question  M.  Renan  has  not  answered ;  as  far 
as  we  can  see  he  has  not  perceived  that  it  is  the  first 
question  for  him  to  answer,  in  giving  a  philosophical 
account  of  the  history  of  Christianity.  Instead,  he 
tells  us,  and  he  is  going  still  further  to  tell  us,  how 
Rome  and  its  wonderful  influences  acted  on  Chris- 
tianity, and  helped  to  assure  its  victories.  But,  first 
of  all,  what  is  that  Christianity,  and  whence  did  it 
come,  which  Rome  so  helped  ?  It  came,  he  says, 
from  Judaism;  "it  was  Judaism  under  its  Christian 
form  which  Rome  propagated  without  wishing  it,  yet 
with  such  mighty  energy  that  from  a  certain  epoch 
Romanism  and  Christianity  became  synonymous 
words  "  ;  it  was  Jewish  monotheism,  the  religion  the 
Roman  hated  and  despised,  swallowing  up  by  its 
contrast  all  that  was  local,  legendary,  and  past  belief, 
and  presenting  one  religious  law  to  the  countless 
nationalities  of  the  Empire,  which  like  itself  was  one, 
and  like  itself  above  all  nationalities. 

This  may  all  be  true,  and  is  partially  true ;  but 
how  did  that  hated  and  partial  Judaism  break  through 
its  trammels,  and  become  a  religion  for  all  men,  and 
a  religion  to  which  all  men  gathered  ?  The  Roman 
organisation  was  an  admirable  vehicle  for  Christianity; 
but  the  vehicle  does  not  make  that  which  it  carries, 
or  account  for  it.     M.  Renan's  picture  of  the  Empire 


XIII  KENAN'S  HIBBERT  LECTURES  227 

abounds  with  all  those  picturesque  details  which  he 
knows  so  well  where  to  find,  and  knows  so  well,  too, 
how  to  place  in  an  interesting  light.  There  were  then, 
of  course,  conditions  of  the  time  more  favourable  to 
the  Christian  Church  than  would  have  been  the  con- 
ditions of  other  times.  There  was  a  certain  increased 
liberty  of  thought,  though  there  were  also  some  pretty 
strong  obstacles  to  it.  M.  Renan  has  Imperial  pro- 
clivities, and  reminds  us  truly  enough  that  despotisms 
are  sometimes  more  tolerant  than  democracies,  and 
that  political  liberty  is  not  the  same  as  spiritual  and 
mental  freedom,  and  does  not  always  favour  it.  It 
may  be  partially  true,  as  he  says,  that  "Virgil  and 
Tibullus  show  that  Roman  harshness  and  cruelty 
were  softening  down  " ;  that  "  equality  and  the  rights 
of  men  were  preached  by  the  Stoics  " ;  that  "woman 
was  more  her  own  mistress,  and  slaves  w^ere  better 
treated  than  in  the  days  of  Cato";  that  "very 
humane  and  just  law^s  were  enacted  under  the  very 
worst  emperors ;  that  Tiberius  and  Nero  were  able 
financiers "  ;  that  "  after  the  terrible  butcheries  of 
the  old  centuries,  mankind  was  crying  with  the  voice 
of  Virgil  for  peace  and  pity."  A  good  many  qualifi- 
cations and  abatements  start  up  in  our  minds  on 
reading  these  statements,  and  a  good  many  formid- 
able doubts  suggest  themselves,  if  we  can  at  all 
believe  what  has  come  down  to  us  of  the  history  of 
these  times.  It  is  hard  to  accept  quite  literally  the 
bold  assertion  that  "love  for  the  poor,  sympathy 
with  all  men,   almsgiving,  were  becoming  virtues." 


228  KENAN'S  HIBBERT  LECTURES  xiii 

But  allow  this  as  the  fair  and  hopeful  side  of  the 
Empire.  Yet  all  this  is  a  long  way  from  accounting 
for  the  effects  on  the  world  of  Christianity,  even  in 
the  dim,  vaporous  form  in  which  M.  Renan  imagines 
it,  much  more  in  the  actual  concrete  reality  in  which, 
if  we  know  anything,  it  appeared.  "Christianity," 
he  says,  "  responded  to  the  cry  for  peace  and  pity  of 
all  weary  and  tender  souls."  No  doubt  it  did;  but 
what  was  it  that  responded,  and  what  was  its  con- 
solation, and  whence  was  its  power  drawn?  What 
was  there  in  the  known  thoughts  or  hopes  or  motives 
of  men  at  the  time  to  furnish  such  a  response? 
"Christianity,"  he  says,  "could  only  have  been  born 
and  spread  at  a  time  when  men  had  no  longer  a 
country";  "it  was  that  explosion  of  social  and  reli- 
gious ideas  which  became  inevitable  after  Augustus 
had  put  an  end  to  political  struggles,"  after  his  policy 
had  killed  "patriotism."  It  is  true  enough  that  the 
first  Christians,  believing  themselves  subjects  of  an 
Eternal  King  and  in  view  of  an  eternal  world,  felt 
themselves  strangers  and  pilgrims  in  this ;  yet  did 
the  rest  of  the  Roman  world  under  the  Caesars  feel 
that  they  had  no  country,  and  was  the  idea  of 
patriotism  extinct  in  the  age  of  Agricola  ?  But  surely 
the  real  question  worth  asking  is,  What  was  it  amid 
the  increasing  civilisation  and  prosperous  peace  of 
Rome  under  the  first  Emperors  which  made  these 
Christians  relinquish  the  idea  of  a  country  ?  From 
whence  did  Christianity  draw  its  power  to  set  its 
followers  in   inflexible  opposition    to    the   intensest 


XIII  EENAN  S  HIBBERT  LECTURES  229 

worship    of    the    State    that    the    world    has    ever 
known  ? 

To  tell  us  the  conditions  under  which  all  this 
occurred  is  not  to  tell  us  the  cause  of  it.  We  follow 
with  interest  the  sketches  which  M.  Renan  gives  of 
these  conditions,  though  it  must  be  said  that  his 
generalisations  are  often  extravagantly  loose  and  mis- 
leading. We  do  indeed  want  to  know  more  of  those 
wonderful  but  hidden  days  which  intervene  between 
the  great  Advent,  with  its  subsequent  Apostolic  age, 
and  the  days  when  the  Church  appears  fully  consti- 
tuted and  recognised.  German  research  and  French 
intelligence  and  constructiveness  have  done  some- 
thing to  help  us,  but  not  much.  But  at  the  end  of 
all  such  inquiries  appears  the  question  of  questions, 
What  was  the  beginning  and  root  of  it  all  ?  Chris- 
tians have  a  reasonable  answer  to  the  question. 
There  is  none,  there  is  not  really  the  suggestion 
of  one,  in  M.  Renan's  account  of  the  connection 
of  Christianity  with  the  Roman  world. 


11^ 


M.  Renan  has  pursued  the  line  of  thought  indicated 
in  his  first  lecture,  and  in  his  succeeding  lectures  has 
developed  the  idea  that  Christianity,  as  we  know  it, 
was  born  in  Imperial  Rome,  and  that  in  its  visible  form 
and  active  influence  on  the  world  it  was  the  manifest 
1  Guardia7t,  2 1st  April  l88o. 


230  KENAN'S  HIBBERT  LECTURES  xii 

product  of  Roman  instincts  and  habits  ;  it  was  the 
spirit  of  the  Empire  passing  into  a  new  body  and 
accepting  in  exchange  for  poHtical  power,  as  it  slowly 
decayed  and  vanished,  a  spiritual  supremacy  as  un- 
rivalled and  as  astonishing.  The  "  Legend  of  the 
Roman  Church — Peter  and  Paul,"  "  Rome  the  Centre 
in  which  Church  Authority  grew  up,"  and  "Rome 
the  Capital  of  Catholicism,"  are  the  titles  of  the 
three  lectures  in  which  this  thesis  is  explained  and 
illustrated.  A  lecture  on  Marcus  Aurelius,  at  the 
Royal  Institution,  though  not  one  of  the  series,  is 
obviously  connected  with  it,  and  concludes  M.  Renan's 
work  in  England. 

Except  the  brilliant  bits  of  writing  which,  judging 
from  the  full  abstracts  given  in  translation  in  the 
Tiffies,  appear  to  have  been  interspersed,  and  except 
the  undoubting  self-confidence  and  aplomb  with  which 
a  historical  survey,  reversing  the  common  ideas  of 
mankind,  was  delivered,  there  was  little  new  to  be 
learned  from  M.  Renan's  treatment  of  his  sub- 
ject. Perhaps  it  may  be  described  as  the  Roman 
Catholic  theory  of  the  rise  of  the  Church,  put 
in  an  infidel  point  of  view.  It  is  Roman  Catholic 
in  concentrating  all  interest,  all  the  sources  of 
influence  and  power  in  the  Christian  religion 
and  Christian  Church,  from  the  first  moment  at 
Rome.  But  for  Rome  the  Christian  Church  would 
not  have  existed.  The  Church  is  inconceivable 
without  Rome,  and  Rome  as  the  seat  and  centre  of 
its  spiritual  activity.      Everything  else  is  forgotten. 


XIII  renan's  hibbert  lectures  231 

There  were  Christian  Churches  all  over  the  Empire, 
in  Syria,  in  Egypt,  in  Africa,  in  Asia  Minor,  in  Gaul, 
in  Greece.  A  great  body  of  Christian  literature, 
embodying  the  ideas  and  character  of  Christians  all 
over  the  Empire,  was  growing  up,  and  this  was  not 
Roman  and  had  nothing  to  do  with  Rome  ;  it  was 
Greek  as  much  as  Latin,  and  local,  not  metropolitan, 
in  its  characteristics.  Christianity  was  spreading 
here,  there,  and  everywhere,  slowly  and  imperceptibly 
as  the  tide  comes  in,  or  as  cells  multiply  in  the 
growing  tissues  of  organised  matter ;  it  was  spreading 
under  its  many  distinct  guides  and  teachers,  and 
taking  possession  of  the  cities  and  provinces  of  the 
Empire.  All  this  great  movement,  the  real  foundation 
of  all  that  was  to  be,  is  overlooked  and  forgotten  in 
the  attention  which  is  fixed  on  Rome  and  confined  to 
it.  As  in  the  Roman  Catholic  view,  M.  Renan  brings 
St.  Paul  and  St.  Peter  together  to  Rome,  to  found 
that  great  Imperial  Church  in  which  the  manifold 
and  varied  history  of  Christendom  is  merged  and 
swallowed  up.  Only,  of  course,  M.  Renan  brings 
them  there  as  "  fanatics "  instead  of  Apostles  and 
martyrs.  We  know  something  about  St.  Peter  and 
St.  Paul.  We  know  them  at  any  rate  from  their 
writings.  In  M.  Renan's  representation  they  stand 
opposed  to  one  another  as  leaders  of  factions,  to 
whose  fierce  hatreds  and  jealousies  there  is  nothing 
comparable.  "All  the  differences,"  he  is  reported 
to  say,  "  which  divide  orthodox  folks,  heretics, 
schismatics,  in  our  own  day,  are  as  nothing  compared 


232  KENAN'S  HIBBERT  LECTURES  xiii 

with  the  dissension  between  Peter  and  Paul."  It 
is,  as  every  one  knows,  no  new  story ;  but  there  it  is 
in  M.  Renan  in  all  its  crudity,  as  if  it  were  the  most 
manifest  and  accredited  of  truths.  M.  Renan  first 
brings  St.  Paul  to  Rome.  "It  was,"  he  says,  "a 
great  event  in  the  world's  history,  almost  as  pregnant 
with  consequences  as  his  conversion."  How  it  was 
so  M.  Renan  does  not  explain  ;  but  he  brings  St. 
Peter  to  Rome  also,  "  following  at  the  heels  of  St. 
Paul,"  to  counteract  and  neutralise  his  influence. 
And  who  is  this  St  Peter  ?  He  represents  the  Jewish 
element ;  and  what  that  element  was  at  Rome  M. 
Renan  takes  great  pains  to  put  before  us.  He  draws 
an  elaborate  picture  of  the  Jews  and  Jewish  quarter 
of  Rome — a  "  longshore  population  "  of  beggars  and 
pedlars,  with  a  Ghetto  resembling  the  Alsatia  of  The 
Fortunes  of  Nigel,  seething  with  dirt  and  fanaticism. 
These  were  St.  Peter's  congeners  at  Rome,  whose 
ideas  and  claims,  "timid  trimmer"  though  he  was, 
he  came  to  Rome  to  support  against  the  Hellenism 
and  Protestantism  of  St.  Paul.  And  at  Rome  they, 
both  of  them,  probably,  perished  in  Nero's  persecu- 
tion, and  that  is  the  history  of  the  success  of 
Christianity.  "Only  fanatics  can  found  anything. 
Judaism  lives  on  because  of  the  intense  frenzy  of  its 
prophets  and  annalists,  Christianity  by  means  of  its 
martyrs." 

But  a  certain  Clement  arose  after  their  deaths, 
to  arrange  a  reconciliation  between  the  fiercely 
antagonistic  factions  of  St.  Peter  and  St.  Paul.     How 


XIII  KENAN'S  HIBBERT  LECTURES  233 

he  harmonised  them  M.  Renan  leaves  us  to  imagine; 
but  he  did  reconcile  them  ;  he  gathered  in  his  own 
person  the  authority  of  the  Roman  Church ;  he 
lectured  the  Corinthian  Church  on  its  turbulence 
and  insubordination ;  he  anticipated,  M.  Renan  re- 
marked, almost  in  words,  the  famous  saying  of  the 
French  Archbishop  of  Rouen,  "  My  clergy  are  my 
regiment,  and  they  are  drilled  to  obey  like  a  regiment," 
On  this  showing,  Clement  might  almost  be  described 
as  the  real  founder  of  Christianity,  of  which  neither 
St.  Peter  nor  St.  Paul,  with  their  violent  oppositions, 
can  claim  to  be  the  complete  representative  ;  at  any 
rate  he  was  the  first  Pope,  complete  in  all  his 
attributes.  And  in  accordance 'with  this  beginning 
M.  Renan  sees  in  the  Roman  Church,  first,  the 
centre  in  which  Church  authority  grew  up,  and  next, 
the  capital  of  Catholicism.  In  Rome  the  congregation 
gave  up  its  rights  to  its  elders,  and  these  rights  the 
elders  surrendered  to  the  single  ruler  or  Bishop.  The 
creation  of  the  Episcopate  was  eminently  the  work  of 
Rome  ;  and  this  Bishop  of  Rome  caught  the  full 
spirit  of  the  Caesar,  on  whose  decay  he  became  great ; 
and  troubling  himself  little  about  the  deep  questions 
which  exercised  the  minds  and  wrung  the  hearts  of 
thinkers  and  mystics,  he  made  himself  the  foundation  of 
order,  authority,  and  subordination  to  all  parts  of  the 
Imperial  world. 

Such  is  M.  Renan's  explanation  of  the  great 
march  and  triumph  of  the  Christian  Church.  The 
Roman  Empire,  which  we   had   supposed  was   the 


234  KENAN'S  HIBBERT  LECTURES  xiii 

natural  enemy  of  the  Church,  was  really  the  founder 
of  all  that  made  the  Church  strong,  and  bequeathed 
to  the  Church  its  prerogatives  and  its  spirit,  and 
partly  its  machinery.  We  should  hardly  gather  from 
this  picture  that  there  was,  besides,  a  widespread 
Catholic  Church,  with  its  numerous  centres  of  life 
and  thought  and  teaching,  and  with  very  slight 
connection,  in  the  early  times,  with  the  Church  of  the 
capital.  And,  in  the  next  place,  we  should  gather 
from  it  that  there  was  little  more  in  the  Church  than 
a  powerful  and  strongly  built  system  of  centralised 
organisation  and  control ;  we  should  hardly  suspect 
the  existence  of  the  real  questions  which  interested 
or  disturbed  it ;  we  should  hardly  suspect  the  existence 
of  a  living  and  all-engrossing  theology,  or  the  growth 
and  energy  in  it  of  moral  forces,  or  that  the  minds  of 
Christians  about  the  world  were  much  more  busy 
with  the  discipline  of  life,  the  teaching  and  meaning 
of  the  inspired  words  of  Scripture,  and  the  ever- 
recurring  conflict  with  perverseness  and  error,  than 
with  their  dependent  connection  on  the  Imperial 
Primacy  of  Rome,  and  the  lessons  they  were  to  learn 
from  it. 

Disguised  as  it  may  be,  M.  Renan's  lectures  re- 
present not  history,  but  scepticism  as  to  all  possibility 
of  history.  Pictures  of  a  Jewish  Ghetto,  with  its 
ragged  mendicants  smelling  of  garlic,  in  places  where 
Christians  have  been  wont  to  think  of  the  Saints  ; 
ingenious  explanations  as  to  the  way  in  which  the 
"  club  "  of  the  Christian  Church  surrendered  its  rights 


XIII  KENAN'S  HIBBERT  LECTURES  235 

to  a  bureau  of  its  officers  ;  exhortations  to  liberty  and 
tolerance ;  side -glances  at  the  contrasts  of  national 
gifts  and  destinies  and  futures  in  the  first  century  and 
in  the  nineteenth  ;  felicitous  parallels  and  cunning 
epigrams,  subtle  combinations  of  the  pathetic,  the 
egotistical,  and  the  cynical,  all  presented  with  calm 
self-reliance  and  in  the  most  finished  and  distinguished 
of  styles,  may  veil  for  the  moment  from  the  audience 
which  such  things  amuse,  and  even  interest,  the 
hollowness  which  lies  beneath.  But  the  only  meaning 
of  the  lectures  is  to  point  out  more  forcibly  than 
ever  that  besides  the  obvious  riddles  of  man's  life 
there  is  one  stranger  and  more  appalling  still — that 
a  religion  which  M.  Renan  can  never  speak  of  with- 
out admiration  and  enthusiasm  is  based  on  a  self- 
contradiction  and  deluding  falsehood,  more  dreadful 
in  its  moral  inconsistencies  than  the  grave. 

We  cannot  help  feeling  that  M.  Renan  himself  is  a 
true  representative  of  that  highly  cultivated  society  of 
the  Empire  which  would  have  crushed  Christianity, 
and  which  Christianity  vanquished.  He  still  owes 
something,  and  owns  it,  to  what  he  has  abandoned — 
"  I  am  often  tempted  to  say,  as  Job  said,  in  our 
Latin  version,  Etiam  si  Occident  me,  in  ipso  sperabo. 
But  the  next  moment  all  is  gone  —  all  is  but  a 
symbol  and  a  dream."  There  is  no  possibility  of 
solving  the  religious  problem.  He  relapses  into 
profound  disbelief  of  the  worth  and  success  of  moral 
efforts  after  truth.  His  last  word  is  an  exhortation 
to    tolerance  for  "fanatics,"    as  the  best   mode  of 


236  KENAN'S  HIBBERT  LECTURES  xiii 

extinguishing  them.  "  If,  instead  of  leading  Polyeucie 
to  punishment,  the  magistrate,  with  a  smile  and  shake 
of  the  hand,  had  sent  him  home  again,  Polyeiicte 
would  not  have  been  caught  offending  again  ;  perhaps, 
in  his  old  age,  he  would  even  have  laughed  at  his 
escapade,  and  would  have  become  a  sensible  man." 
It  is  as  obvious  and  natural  in  our  days  to  dispose  of 
such  difficulties  in  this  way  with  a  smile  and  a  sneer 
as  it  was  in  the  first  century  with  a  shout — "  Christiani 
ad  leones.^^  But  Corneille  was  as  good  a  judge  of  the 
human  heart  as  M.  Renan.  He  had  gauged  the 
powers  of  faith  and  conviction  ;  he  certainly  would 
have  expected  to  find  his  Polyeucte  more  obstinate. 


XIV 

KENAN'S  "SOUVENIRS  D'ENFANCE"^ 

The  sketches  which  M.  Renan  gives  us  of  his 
early  life  are  what  we  should  have  looked  for 
from  the  writer  of  the  Vie  de  Jesus.  The  story 
of  the  disintegration  of  a  faith  is  supposed  com- 
monly to  have  something  tragic  about  it.  We 
expect  it  to  be  a  story  of  heart-breaking  disenchant- 
ments,  of  painful  struggles,  of  fierce  recoils  against 
ancient  beliefs  and  the  teachers  who  bolstered  them 
up  ;  of  indignation  at  having  been  so  long  deceived ; 
of  lamentation  over  years  wasted  in  the  service  of 
falsehood.  The  confessions  of  St.  Augustine,  the 
biography  of  Blanco  White,  the  letters  of  Lamennais, 
at  least  agree  in  the  witness  which  they  bear  to  the 
bitter  pangs  and  anxieties  amid  which,  in  their  case, 
the  eventful  change  came  about.  Even  Cardinal 
Newman's  Apologia^  self-restrained  and  severely  con- 
trolled as  it  is,  shows  no  doubtful  traces  of  the  con- 
flicts and  sorrows  out  of  which  he  believed  himself  to 

^  Souvenirs   d Enfaiice  et  de  Jeunesse.       Par  Ernest    Renan. 
Guardian,  i8th  July  1883. 


238         KENAN'S  "  SOUVENIRS  D'ENFANCE  "  xiv 

have  emerged  to  a  calmer  and  surer  light.  But  M. 
Renan's  story  is  an  idyl,  not  a  tragedy.  It  is  sunny, 
placid,  contented.  He  calls  his  life  the  ^^  char??ia?ife 
pro7ne?iade''^  which  the  "cause  of  all  good,"  whatever 
that  may  be,  has  granted  him  through  the  realities 
of  existence.  There  are  in  it  no  storms  of  passion, 
no  cruelties  of  circumstances,  no  deplorable  mistakes, 
no  complaints,  no  recriminations.  His  life  flows  on 
smoothly,  peacefully,  happily,  with  little  of  rapids 
and  broken  waters,  gradually  and  in  the  most  natural 
and  inevitable  way  enlarging  itself,  moving  in  new 
and  wider  channels  and  with  increased  volume  and 
force,  but  never  detaching  itself  and  breaking  off 
from  its  beginnings.  It  is  a  spectacle  which  M. 
Renan,  who  has  lived  this  life,  takes  a  gentle  pleasure 
in  contemplating.  He  looks  back  on  it  with  thank- 
fulness, and  also  with  amusement.  It  makes  a 
charming  and  complete  picture.  No  part  could  be 
wanting  without  injuring  the  effect  of  the  whole.  It 
is  the  very  ideal  of  the  education  of  the  Rousseau 
school — a  child  of  nature,  developing,  amid  the 
simplest  and  humblest  circumstances  of  life,  the 
finest  gifts  and  most  delicate  graces  of  faith  and 
reverence  and  purity — brought  up  by  sages  whose 
wisdom  he  could  not  in  time  help  outrunning,  but 
whose  piety,  sweetness,  disinterestedness,  and  devoted 
labour  left  on  his  mind  impressions  which  nothing 
could  wear  out ;  and  at  length,  when  the  time  came, 
passing  naturally,  and  without  passion  or  bitterness, 
from  out  of  their  faithful  but  too  narrow  discipline 


XIV         KENAN'S  "  SOUVENIRS  D'ENFANCE  "         239 

into  a  wider  and  ampler  air,  and  becoming,  as  was 
fit,  master  and  guide  to  himself,  with  light  which  they 
could  not  bear,  and  views  of  truth  greater  and  deeper 
than  they  could  conceive.  But  every  stage  of  the 
progress,  through  the  virtues  of  the  teachers,  and  the 
felicitous  disposition  of  the  pupil,  exhibits  both  in 
exactly  the  due  relations  in  which  each  ought  to  be 
with  the  other,  with  none  of  the  friction  of  rebellious 
and  refractory  temper  on  one  side,  or  of  unintelligent 
harshness  on  the  other.  He  has  nothing  to  regret 
in  the  schools  through  which  he  passed,  in  the  pre- 
parations which  he  made  there  for  the  future,  in  the 
way  in  which  they  shaped  his  life.  He  lays  down  the 
maxim,  "On  ne  doit  jamais  ecrire  que  de  ce  qu'on 
aime."  There  is  a  serene  satisfaction  diffused  through 
the  book,  which  scarcely  anything  intervenes  to  break 
or  disturb ;  he  sees  so  much  poetry  in  his  life,  so  much 
content,  so  much  signal  and  unlooked-for  success, 
that  he  has  Httle  to  tell  except  what  is  delightful  and 
admirable.  And  then  he  is  so  certain  that  he  is 
right:  he  can  look  down  with  so  much  good-humoured 
superiority  on  past  and  present,  alike  on  what  he  calls 
"Teffroyable  aventure  du  moyen  age,"  and  on  the 
march  of  modern  society  to  the  dead  level  of  "Ameri- 
canism." It  need  not  be  said  that  the  story  is 
told  with  all  M.  Renan's  consummate  charm  of  story- 
telling. All  that  it  wants  is  depth  of  real  feehng  and 
seriousness — some  sense  of  the  greatness  of  what  he 
has  had  to  give  up,  not  merely  of  its  poetic  beauty 
and   tender  associations.     It  hardly  seems  to  occur 


240         KENAN'S  "  SOUVENIRS  D'ENFANCE  "  xiv 

to  him  that  something  more  than  his  easy  cheerfulness 
and  his  vivid  historical  imagination  is  wanted  to  solve 
for  him  the  problems  of  the  world,  and  that  his 
gradual  transition  from  the  Catholicism  of  the  semin- 
ary to  the  absolute  rejection  of  the  supernatural 
in  religion  does  not,  as  he  describes  it,  throw  much 
light  on  the  question  of  the  hopes  and  destiny  of 
mankind. 

The  outline  of  his  story  is  soon  told.  It  is  in 
general  like  that  of  many  more  who  in  France  have 
broken  away  from  religion.  A  clever  studious  boy, 
a  true  son  of  old  Brittany — the  most  melancholy,  the 
most  tender,  the  most  ardent,  the  most  devout,  not 
only  of  all  French  provinces,  but  of  all  regions  in 
Europe — is  passed  on  from  the  teaching  of  good, 
simple,  hard-working  country  priests  to  the  central 
seminaries,  where  the  leaders  of  the  French  clergy 
are  educated.  He  comes  up  a  raw,  eager,  ignorant 
provincial,  full  of  zeal  for  knowledge,  full  of  rever- 
ence and  faith,  and  first  goes  through  the  distin- 
guished literary  school  of  St.  Nicolas  du  Chardonnet, 
of  which  Dupanloup  was  the  founder  and  the  inspir- 
ing soul.  Thence  he  passed  under  the  more  strictly 
professional  discipline  of  St.  Sulpice :  first  at  the 
preparatory  philosophical  school  at  Issy,  then  to 
study  scientific  theology  in  the  house  of  St.  Sulpice 
itself  at  Paris.  At  St.  Sulpice  he  showed  special 
aptitudes  for  the  study  of  Hebrew,  in  which  he  was 
assisted  and  encouraged  by  M.  le  Hir,  "the  most 
remarkable   person,"    in   his   opijiion,    "  whom    the 


XIV  KENAN'S  "  SOUVENIRS  D'ENFANCE  '         241 

French  clergy  has  produced  in  our  days,"  a  "savant 
and  a  saint,"  who  had  mastered  the  results  of  German 
criticism  as  they  were  found  in  the  works  of  Gesenius 
and  Ewald.  On  his  faith  all  this  knowledge  had  not 
made  the  faintest  impression ;  but  it  was  this  know- 
ledge which  broke  down  M.  Renan's,  and  finally  led 
to  his  retiring  from  St.  Sulpice.  On  the  one  side  was 
the  Bible  and  Catholic  theology,  carefully,  scienti- 
fically, and  consistently  taught  at  St.  Sulpice ;  on  the 
other  were  the  exegesis  and  the  historical  criticism  of 
the  German  school.  He  came  at  length  to  the  con- 
clusion that  the  two  are  incompatible ;  that  there 
was  but  a  choice  of  alternatives ;  and  purely  on  the 
ground  of  historical  criticism,  he  says,  not  on  any 
abstract  objections  to  the  supernatural,  or  to  miracles, 
or  to  Catholic  dogma,  he  gave  up  revealed  religion. 
He  gave  it  up  not  without  regrets  at  the  distress 
caused  to  friends,  and  at  parting  with  much  that  was 
endeared  to  him  by  old  associations,  and  by  intrinsic 
beauty  and  value  ;  but,  as  far  as  can  be  judged,  with- 
out any  serious  sense  of  loss.  He  spent  some  time 
in  obscurity,  teaching,  and  studying  laboriously,  and 
at  length  beginning  to  write.  Michel  Levy,  the  pub- 
Hsher,  found  him  out,  and  opened  to  him  a  Hterary 
career,  and  in  due  time  he  became  famous.  He  has 
had  the  ambiguous  honour  of  making  the  Bible  an 
object  of  such  interest  to  French  readers  as  it  never 
was  before,  at  the  cost  of  teaching  them  to  find  in  it 
a  reflection  of  their  own  characteristic  ways  of  look- 
ing at  life  and  the  world.  It  is  not  an  easy  thing  to 
VOL.  II  R 


242         KENAN'S  ''SOUVENIRS  D'EXFANCE"  xiv 

do  with   such    a    book    as    the  Bible ;    but  he  has 
done  it. 

As  a  mere  history  of  a  change  of  convictions,  the 
Souvenirs  are  interesting,  but  hardly  of  much  import- 
ance. They  are  written  with  a  kind  of  Epicurean 
serenity  and  dignity,  avoiding  all  exaggeration  and 
violence,  profuse  in  every  page  in  the  delicacies 
and  also  in  the  reticences  of  respect,  not  too 
serious  to  exclude  the  perpetual  suggestion  of 
a  well-behaved  amused  irony,  not  too  much  alive 
to  the  ridiculous  and  the  self-contradictory  to  forget 
the  attitude  of  composure  due  to  the  theme  of 
the  book.  He  warns  his  readers  at  the  outset  that 
they  must  not  look  for  a  stupid  literalness  in  his 
account.  "Ce  qu'on  dit  de  soi  est  toujours  poesie" 
— the  reflection  of  states  of  mind  and  varying 
humours,  not  the  exact  details  of  fact.  "Tout  est 
vrai  dans  ce  petit  volume,  mais  non  de  ce  genre  de 
verite  qui  est  requis  pour  une  Biographie  universelle. 
Bien  des  choses  ont  ete  mises,  afin  qu'on  sourie ;  si 
I'usage  I'eut  permis,  j'aurais  du  ecrire  plus  d'une  fois 
a  la  marge — cu77i  grmio  salis^  It  is  candid  to  warn 
us  thus  to  read  a  little  between  the  lines ;  but  it  is  a 
curious  and  unconscious  disclosure  of  his  character- 
istic love  of  a  mixture  of  the  misty  and  the  clear.  The 
really  pleasant  part  of  it  is  his  account,  which  takes  up 
half  the  volume,  of  Breton  ways  and  feelings  half  a 
century  ago,  an  account  which  exactly  tallies  with 
the  pictures  of  them  in  Souvestre's  writings ;  and  the 
kindliness  and  justice  with  which  he  speaks  of  his 


XIV  KENAN'S  "  SOUVENIRS  D'ENFANCE  "         243 

old  Catholic  and  priestly  teachers,  not  only  in  his 
boyish  days  at  Treguier,  but  in  his  seminary  life  in 
Paris.  His  account  of  this  seminary  life  is  unique  in 
its  picturesque  vividness.  He  describes  how,  at  St. 
Nicolas,  under  the  fiery  and  irresistible  Dupanloup, 
whom  he  speaks  of  with  the  reserved  courtesy  due  to 
a  distinguished  person  whom  he  much  dislikes,  his 
eager  eyes  were  opened  to  the  realities  of  literature, 
and  to  the  subtle  powers  of  form  and  style  in  writing, 
which  have  stood  him  in  such  stead,  and  have  been 
the  real  secret  of  his  own  success. 

Le  monde  s'ouvrit  pour  moi.  Malgre  sa  pretention 
d'etre  un  asile  ferme  aux  bruits  du  dehors,  Saint-Nicolas 
etait  k  cette  epoque  la  maison  la  plus  brillante  et  la  plus 
mondaine.  Paris  y  entrait  a  pleins  bords  par  les  portes 
et  les  fenetres,  Paris  tout  entier,  moins  la  corruption,  je  me 
hate  de  le  dire,  Paris  avec  ses  petitesses  et  ses  grandeurs, 
ses  hardiesses  et  ses  chiffons,  sa  force  revolutionnaire  et 
ses  mollesses  flasques.  Mes  vieux  pretres  de  Bretagne 
savaient  bien  mieux  les  mathematiques  et  le  latin  que 
mes  nouveaux  maitres  ;  mais  ils  vivaient  dans  des  cata- 
combes  sans  lumiere  et  sans  air,  Ici,  I'atmosphere  du 
siecle  circulait  librement.  .  .  .  Au  bout  de  quelque 
temps  une  chose  tout  a  fait  inconnue  m'etait  revelee. 
Les  mots,  talent,  eclat,  reputation  eurent  un  sens  pour 
moi.  J'etais  perdu  pour  I'ideal  modeste  que  mes  anciens 
maitres  m'avaient  inculque. 

And  he  describes  how  Dupanloup  brought  his- 
pupils  perpetually  into  direct  relations  with  himself 
and  communicated  to  them  something  of  his  own. 


244         RENAN'S  "  SOUVENIRS  D'ENFAKCE  "  xiv 

enthusiasm.  He  gained  the  power  over  their  hearts 
which  a  great  general  gains  over  his  soldiers.  His 
approval,  his  interest  in  a  man,  were  the  all-absorbing 
object,  the  all-sufficient  reward ;  the  one  punishment 
feared  was  dismissal,  always  inflicted  with  courtesy 
and  tact,  from  the  honour  and  the  joy  of  serving 
under  him  : — 

Adore  de  ses  eleves,  M.  Dupanloup  n'etait  pas  tou- 
jours  agreable  a  ces  collaborateurs.  On  m'a  dit  que, 
plus  tard,  dans  son  diocese,  les  clioses  se  passerent  de 
la  meme  maniere,  qu'il  fut  toujours  plus  aime  de  ses 
la'iques  que  de  ses  pretres.  II  est  certain  qu'il  ecrasait 
tout  autour  de  lui.  Mais  sa  violence  meme  nous 
attachait ;  car  nous  sentions  que  nous  etions  son  but 
unique.  Ce  qu'il  etait,  c'etait  un  eveilleur  incomparable  ; 
pour  tirer  de  chacun  de  ses  eleves  la  somme  de  ce  qu'il 
pouvait  donner,  personne  ne  I'egalait.  Chacun  de  ses 
deux  cents  eleves  existait  distinct  dans  sa  pensee  ;  il 
etait  pour  chacun  d'eux  I'excitateur  toujours  present, 
le  motif  de  vivre  et  de  travailler.  II  croyait  au  talent  et 
en  faisait  la  base  de  la  foi.  II  repetait  souvent  que 
I'homme  vaut  en  proportion  de  sa  faculte  d'admirer.  Son 
admiration  n'etait  pas  toujours  assez  eclairee  par  la 
science  ;  mais  elle  venait  d'une  grande  chaleur  d'ame  et 
d'un  cceur  vraiment  possede  de  I'amour  du  beau.  .  .  . 
Les  defauts  de  I'education  qu'il  donnait  etaient  les  defauts 
meme  de  son  esprit.  II  etait  trop  peu  rationnel,  trop 
peu  scientifique.  On  eut  dit  que  ses  deux  cents  eleves 
etaient  destines  h.  etre  tous  poctes,  ecrivains,  orateurs. 

St.  Nicolas  was    literary.       Issy    and    St.    Sulpice 


XIV  KENAN'S  "  SOUVENIRS  D'ENFANCE  "         245 

were  severely  philosophic  and  scientific,  places  of 
^'■fortes  etudes " ;  and  the  writer  thinks  that  they 
were  more  to  his  own  taste  than  the  more  brilliant 
literary  education  given  under  Dupanloup.  In 
one  sense  it  may  be  so.  They  introduced  him 
to  exactness  of  thought  and  precision  of  expres- 
sion, and  they  widened  his  horizon  of  possible  and 
attainable  knowledge.  He  passed,  he  says,  from 
words  to  things.  But  he  is  a  writer  who  owes  so 
much  to  the  form  into  which  he  throws  his  thoughts, 
to  the  grace  and  brightness  and  richness  of  his  style, 
that  he  probably  is  a  greater  debtor  to  the  master 
whom  he  admires  and  dislikes,  Dupanloup,  than  to 
the  modest,  reserved,  and  rather  dull  Sulpician 
teachers,  whom  he  loves  and  reveres  and  smiles  at, 
whose  knowledge  of  theology  was  serious,  profound, 
and  accurate,  and  whose  characteristic  temper  was 
one  of  moderation  and  temperate  reason,  joined  to  a 
hatred  of  display,  and  a  suspicion  of  all  that  seemed 
too  clever  and  too  brilliant.  But  his  witness  to  their 
excellence,  to  their  absolute  self-devotion  to  their 
work,  to  their  dislike  of  extravagance  and  exaggera- 
tion, to  their  good  sense  and  cultivation,  is  ungrudg- 
ing and  warm.  Of  course  he  thinks  them  utterly  out 
of  date ;  but  on  their  own  ground  he  recognises  that 
they  were  men  of  strength  and  solidity,  the  best  and 
most  thorough  of  teachers ;  the  most  sincere,  the 
most  humble,  the  most  self-forgetting  of  priests  : — 

Beaucoup  de  mes  jugements  etonnent  les   gens  du 
monde  parcequ^ils  n'ont  pas  vu  ce  que  j'ai  vu.     J'ai  vu  k 


246         RENAX'S  "  SOUVENIRS  D'ENFANCE  "  xiv 

Saint-Sulpice,  associes  k  des  idees  etroites,  je  I'avoue,  les 
miracles  que  nos  races  peuvent  produire  en  fait  de  bonte, 
de  modestie,  d'abnegation  personelle.  Ce  qu'il  y  a  de 
vertu  h.  Saint-Sulpice  suffirait  pour  gouverner  un  monde, 
et  cela  m'a  rendu  difficile  pour  ce  que  j'ai  trouve  ailleurs. 

M.  Renan,  as  we  have  said,  is  very  just  to  his  educa- 
tion, and  to  the  men  who  gave  it.  He  never  speaks 
of  them  except  with  respect  and  gratitude.  It  is 
seldom,  indeed,  that  he  permits  himself  anything  like 
open  disparagement  of  the  men  and  the  cause  which 
he  forsook.  The  shafts  of  his  irony  are  reserved  for 
men  on  his  own  side,  for  the  radical  violences  of  M. 
Clemenceau,  and  for  the  exaggerated  reputation  of 
Auguste  Comte,  "who  has  been  set  up  as  a  man  of 
the  highest  order  of  genius,  for  having  said,  in  bad 
French,  what  all  scientific  thinkers  for  two  hundred 
years  have  seen  as  clearly  as  himself"  He  attributes 
to  his  ecclesiastical  training  those  excellences  in  his 
own  temper  and  principles  on  which  he  dwells  with 
much  satisfaction  and  thankfulness.  They  are,  he 
considers,  the  result  of  his  Christian  and  "  Sulpician  " 
education,  though  the  root  on  which  they  grew  is 
for  ever  withered  and  dead.  "  La  foi  disparue,  la 
morale  reste.  .  .  .  C'est  par  le  caract^re  que  je 
suis  restd  essentiellement  I'eleve  de  mes  anciens 
maitres."  He  is  proud  of  these  virtues,  and  at  the 
same  time  amused  at  the  odd  contradictions  in  which 
they  have  sometimes  involved  him  : — 

II  me  plairait  d'expliquer  par  le  detail  et  de  montrer 


XIV  KENAN'S  "  SOUVENIRS  D'ENFANCE  "         247 

comment  la  gageure  paradoxale  de  garder  les  vertus 
clericales,  sans  la  foi  qui  leur  sert  de  base  et  dans  un 
monde  pour  lequel  elles  ne  sont  pas  faites,  produisit,  en 
ce  que  me  concerne,  les  rencontres  les  plus  divertissantes. 
J'aimerais  k  raconter  toutes  les  aventures  que  mes  vertus 
sulpiciennes  m'amenerent,  et  les  tours  singuliers  qu'elles 
m'ont  joues.  Apres  soixante  ans  de  vie  serieuse  on  a  le 
droit  de  sourire  ;  et  ou  trouver  une  source  de  rire  plus 
abondante,  plus  h  portee,  plus  inoffensive  qu'en  soi- 
meme  ?  Si  jamais  un  auteur  comique  voulait  amuser  le 
public  de  mes  ridicules,  je  ne  lui  demanderais  qu'une 
chose;  c'est  de  me  prendre  pour  collaborateur ;  je  lui 
conterais  des  choses  vingt  fois  plus  amusantes  que  celles 
qu'il  pourrait  inventer. 

He  dwells  especially  on  four  of  these  virtues  which 
were,  he  thinks,  graven  ineffaceably  on  his  nature  at  St. 
Sulpice.  They  taught  him  there  not  to  care  for  money 
or  success.  They  taught  him  the  old-fashioned 
French  politeness — that  beautiful  instinct  of  giving 
place  to  others,  which  is  perishing  in  the  democratic 
scramble  for  the  best  places,  in  the  omnibus  and  the 
railway  as  in  business  and  society.  It  is  more  curious 
to  find  that  he  thinks  that  they  taught  him  to  be 
modest.  Except  on  the  faith  of  his  assertions,  the 
readers  of  his  book  would  not  naturally  have  supposed 
that  he  believed  himself  specially  endowed  with  this 
quality;  it  is  at  any  rate  the  modesty  which,  if  it 
shrinks  into  retirement  from  the  pretensions  of  the 
crowd,  goes  along  with  a  high  and  pitying  sense  of 
superiority,  and  a  self-complacency  of  which  the  good 


248         EENAN'S  "  SOUVENIRS  D'ENFANCE  "  xiv 

humour  never  fails.  His  masters  also  taught  him  to 
value  purity.  For  this  he  almost  makes  a  sort  of 
deprecating  apology.  He  saw,  indeed,  "the  vanity 
of  this  virtue  as  of  all  the  others  " ;  he  admits  that  it 
is  an  unnatural  virtue.  But  he  says,  "L'homme  ne 
doit  jamais  se  permettre  deux  hardiesses  a  la  fois. 
Le  libre  penseur  doit  etre  regie  en  ses  moeurs."  In 
this  doctrine  it  may  be  doubted  whether  he  will  find 
many  followers.  An  unnatural  virtue,  where  nature 
only  is  recognised  as  a  guide,  is  more  likely  to  be 
discredited  by  his  theory  than  recommended  by  his 
example,  particularly  if  the  state  of  opinion  in  France 
is  such  as  is  described  in  the  following  passage — a 
passage  which  in  England  few  men,  whatever  they 
might  think,  would  have  the  boldness  to  state  as  an 
acknowledged  social  phenomenon  : — 

Le  monde,  dont  les  jugements  sont  rarement  tout  k 
fait  faux,  voit  une  sorte  de  ridicule  k  etre  vertueux  quand 
on  n'y  est  pas  oblige  par  un  devoir  professionnel.  Le 
pretre,  ayant  pour  etat  d'etre  chaste,  comme  le  soldat 
d'etre  brave,  est,  d'apres  ces  idees,  presque  le  seul  qui 
puisse  sans  ridicule  tenir  h  des  principes  sur  lesquels  la 
morale  et  la  mode  se  livrent  les  plus  etranges  combats. 
II  est  hors  de  doute  qu'en  ce  point,  comme  en  beaucoup 
d'autres,  mes  principes  clericaux,  conserves  dans  le  siecle, 
m'ont  nui  aux  yeux  du  monde. 

We  have  one  concluding  observation  to  make. 
This  is  a  book  of  which  the  main  interest,  after  all, 
depends  on  the  way  in  which  it  touches  on  the  ques- 


XIV  KENAN'S  "  SOUVENIRS  D'ENFANCE  "         249 

tion  of  questions,  the  truth  and  reality  of  the  Christian 
rehgion.  But  from  first  to  last  it  does  not  show  the 
faintest  evidence  that  the  writer  ever  really  knew,  or 
even  cared,  what  religion  is.  Religion  is  not  only  a 
matter  of  texts,  of  scientific  criticisms,  of  historical 
investigations,  of  a  consistent  theology.  It  is  not 
merely  a  procession  of  external  facts  and  events,  a 
spectacle  to  be  looked  at  from  the  outside.  It  is,  if 
it  is  anything,  the  most  considerable  and  most  uni- 
versal interest  in  the  complex  aggregate  of  human 
interests.  It  grows  out  of  the  deepest  moral  roots, 
out  of  the  most  characteristic  and  most  indestructible 
spiritual  elements,  out  of  wants  and  needs  and  aspira- 
tions and  hopes,  without  which  man,  as  we  know 
him,  would  not  be  man.  When  a  man,  in  asking 
whether  Christianity  is  true,  leaves  out  all  this  side  of 
the  matter,  when  he  shows  that  it  has  not  come 
before  him  as  a  serious  and  importunate  reality,  when 
he  shows  that  he  is  unaffected  by  those  deep  move- 
ments and  misgivings  and  anxieties  of  the  soul  to 
which  religion  corresponds,  and  treats  the  whole  matter 
as  a  question  only  of  erudition  and  criticism,  we  may 
acknowledge  him  to  be  an  original  and  acute  critic,  a 
brilliant  master  of  historical  representation ;  but  he 
has  never  yet  come  face  to  face  with  the  problems  of 
religion.  His  love  of  truth  may  be  unimpeachable, 
but  he  does  not  know  what  he  is  talking  about.  M. 
Renan  speaks  of  giving  up  his  religion  as  a  man  might 
speak  of  accepting  a  new  and  unpopular  physical  hypo- 
thesis like  evolution,  or  of  making  up  his  mind  to  give 


250         REXAN'S  "  SOUVENIRS  D'ENFAXCE  "  xiv 

up  the  personality  of  Homer  or  the  early  history  of 
Rome.  Such  an  interior  attitude  of  mind  towards 
religion  as  is  implied,  for  instance,  in  Bishop  Butler's 
Sermofis  ott  the  Love  of  God,  or  the  De  Imita- 
tiotie,  or  Newman's  Parochial  Ser??w?is,  seems  to 
him,  as  far  as  w^e  can  judge,  an  unknown  and  un- 
attempted  experience.  It  is  easy  to  deal  with  a 
question  if  you  leave  out  half  the  factors  of  it,  and 
those  the  most  difficult  and  the  most  serious.  It  is 
easy  to  be  clear  if  you  do  not  choose  to  take  notice 
of  the  mysterious,  and  if  you  exclude  from  your  con- 
sideration as  vague  and  confused  all  that  vast  depart- 
ment of  human  concerns  where  we  at  best  can  only 
"  see  through  a  glass  darkly."  It  is  easy  to  find 
the  world  a  pleasant  and  comfortable  and  not  at  all 
perplexing  place,  if  your  life  has  been,  as  M.  Renan 
describes  his  own,  a  "  charming  promenade  "  through 
it ;  if,  as  he  says,  you  are  blessed  with  "  a  good 
humour  not  easily  disturbed";  and  you  "have  not 
suffered  much  "  ;  and  "  nature  has  prepared  cushions 
to  soften  shocks " ;  and  you  have  "  had  so  much 
enjoyment  in  this  life  that  you  really  have  no  right  to 
claim  any  compensation  beyond  it."  That  is  M. 
Renan's  experience  of  life — a  life  of  which  he  looks 
forward  to  the  perfection  in  the  clearness  and  security 
of  its  possible  denials  of  ancient  beliefs,  and  in  the 
immense  development  of  its  positive  and  experi- 
mental knowledge.  How  would  Descartes  have  re- 
joiced, he  says,  if  he  could  have  seen  some  poor 
treatise  on  physics  or  cosmography  of  our  day,  and 


XIV  KENAN'S  "  SOUVENIRS  D'ENFANCE  "         251 

what  would  we  not  give  to  catch  a  glimpse  of 
such  an  elementary  schoolbook  of  a  hundred  years 
hence. 

But  that  is  not  at  any  rate  the  experience  of  all  the 
world,  nor  does  it  appear  likely  ever  to  be  within  the 
reach  of  all  the  world.  There  is  another  aspect  of  life 
more  familiar  than  this,  an  aspect  which  has  presented 
itself  to  the  vast  majority  of  mankind,  the  awful  view 
of  it  which  is  made  tragic  by  pain  and  sorrow  and 
moral  evil ;  which,  in  the  way  in  which  religion  looks 
at  it,  if  it  is  sterner,  is  also  higher  and  nobler,  and  is 
brightened  by  hope  and  purposes  of  love;  a  view 
which  puts  more  upon  men  and  requires  more  from 
them,  but  holds  before  them  a  destiny  better  than 
the  perfection  here  of  physical  science.  To  minds 
which  realise  all  this,  it  is  more  inconceivable  than 
any  amount  of  miracle  that  such  a  religion  as  Chris- 
tianity should  have  emerged  naturally  out  of  the 
conditions  of  the  first  century.  They  refuse  to  settle 
such  a  question  by  the  short  and  easy  method  on 
which  M.  Renan  relies ;  they  will  not  consent  to  put 
it  on  questions  about  the  two  Isaiahs,  or  about 
alleged  discrepancies  between  the  Evangelists ;  they 
will  not  think  the  claims  of  religion  disposed  of  by 
M.  Renan's  canon,  over  and  over  again  contradicted, 
that  whether  there  can  be  or  not,  there  is  no  evidence 
of  the  supernatural  in  the  world.  To  those  who 
measure  and  feel  the  true  gravity  of  the  issues,  it  is 
almost  unintelligible  to  find  a  man  who  has  been  face 
to  face  with  Christianity  all  his  life  treating  the  de- 


252         REX AN'S  "  SOUVENIRS  D'ENFANCE  "  xiv 

liberate  condemnation  of  it  almost  gaily  and  with  a 
light  heart,  and  showing  no  regrets  in  having  to  give 
it  up  as  a  delusion  and  a  dream.  It  is  a  poor  and 
meagre  end  of  a  life  of  thought  and  study  to  come  to 
the  conclusion  that  the  age  in  which  he  has  lived  is, 
if  not  one  of  the  greatest,  at  least  "  the  most  amusing 
of  all  ages." 


XV 

LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON^ 

If  the  proof  of  a  successful  exhibition  of  a  strongly 
marked  and  original  character  be  that  it  excites  and 
sustains  interest  throughout,  that  our  tastes  are 
appealed  to  and  our  judgments  called  forth  with 
great  strength,  that  we  pass  continuously  and  rapidly, 
as  we  read,  from  deep  and  genuine  admiration  to 
equally  deep  and  genuine  dissent  and  disapprobation, 
that  it  allows  us  to  combine  a  general  but  irresistible 
sense  of  excellence  growing  upon  us  through  the 
book  with  an  under-current  of  real  and  honest  dis- 
like and  blame,  then  this  book  in  a  great  measure 
satisfies  the  condition  of  success.  It  is  undeniable 
that  in  what  it  shows  us  of  Mr.  Robertson  there  is 
much  to  admire,  much  to  sympathise  with,  much  to 
touch  us,  a  good  deal  to  instruct  us.  He  is  set  before 
us,  indeed,  by  the  editor,  as  the  ideal  of  all  that  a 
great  Christian  teacher  and  spiritual  guide,  all  that  a 
brave  and  wise  and  high-souled  man,  may  be  con- 

1  Life  and  Letters   of  Frederick    W.    Robe^-tson.      Edited    by 
Stopford  A.  Brooke.      Guardian,  15th  November  1865. 


254  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON  xv 

ceived  to  be.  We  cannot  quite  accept  him  as  an 
example  of  such  rare  and  signal  achievement;  and 
the  fault  of  the  book  is  the  common  one  of  warm- 
hearted biographers  to  wind  their  own  feelings  and 
those  of  their  readers  too  high  about  their  subject ; 
to  talk  as  if  their  hero's  excellences  were  unknown 
till  he  appeared  to  display  them,  and  to  make  up  for 
the  imperfect  impression  resulting  from  actual  facts 
and  qualities  by  insisting  with  overstrained  emphasis 
on  a  particular  interpretation  of  them.  The  book 
would  be  more  truthful  and  more  pleasing  if  the 
editor's  connecting  comments  were  more  simply 
written,  and  made  less  pretension  to  intensity  and 
energy  of  language.  Yet  with  all  drawbacks  of  what 
seem  to  us  imperfect  taste,  an  imperfect  standard 
of  character,  and  an  imperfect  appreciation  of  what 
there  is  in  the  world  beyond  a  given  circle  of  interests, 
the  book  does  what  a  biography  ought  to  do — it 
shows  us  a  remarkable  man,  and  it  gives  us  the 
means  of  forming  our  own  judgment  about  him.  It 
is  not  a  tame  panegyric  or  a  fancy  picture. 

The  main  portion  of  the  book  consists  of  Mr. 
Robertson's  own  letters,  and  his  own  accounts  of  him- 
self; and  we  are  allowed  to  see  him,  in  a  great  degree 
at  least,  as  he  really  was.  The  editor  draws  a  moral, 
indeed,  and  tells  us  what  we  ought  to  think  about  what 
we  see  ;  but  we  can  use  our  own  judgment  about  that. 
And,  as  so  often  happens  in  real  life,  what  we  see 
both  attracts  and  repels ;  it  calls  forth,  successively 
and  in  almost   equal  measure,  warm   sympathy  and 


XV  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON  255 

admiration,  and  distinct  and  hearty  disagreement. 
At  least  there  is  nothing  of  commonplace — of  what 
is  commonplace  yet  in  our  generation ;  though  there 
is  a  good  deal  that  bids  fair  to  become  common- 
place in  the  next.  It  is  the  record  of  a  genuine  spon- 
taneous character,  seeking  its  way,  its  duty,  its  per- 
fection, with  much  sincerity  and  elevation  of  purpose, 
and  many  anxieties  and  sorrows,  and  not,  we  doubt 
not,  without  much  of  the  fruits  that  come  with  real 
self-devotion  ;  a  record  disclosing  a  man  with  great 
faults  and  conspicuous  blanks  in  his  nature,  one  with 
whose  principles,  taste,  or  judgment  we  constantly 
find  ourselves  having  a  vehement  quarrel,  just  after 
having  been  charmed  and  conciliated  by  some  un- 
expectedly powerful  or  refined  statement  of  an  im- 
portant truth.  We  cannot  think,  and  few  besides 
his  own  friends  will  think,  that  he  had  laid  his  hand 
with  so  sure  an  accuracy  and  with  so  much  promise 
upon  the  clue  which  others  had  lost  or  bungled  over. 
But  there  is  much  to  learn  in  his  thoughts  and  words, 
and  there  is  not  less  to  learn  from  his  hfe.  It  is  the 
life  of  a  man  who  did  not  spare  himself  in  fulfilling 
what  he  received  as  his  task,  who  sacrificed  much  in 
order  to  speak  his  message,  as  he  thought,  more 
worthily  and  to  do  his  office  more  effectually,  and 
whose  career  touches  us  the  more  from  the  shadow 
of  suffering  and  early  death  that  hangs  over  its 
aspirations  and  activity.  A  book  which  fairly  shows 
us  such  a  life  is  not  of  less  value  because  it  also  shows 
us  much  that  we  regret  and  condemn. 


256  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON  xv 

Mr.  Robertson  was  brought  up  not  only  in  the 
straitest  traditions  of  the  EvangeUcal  school,  but  in 
the  heat  of  its  controversial  warfare.  His  heart,  when 
he  was  a  boy,  was  set  on  entering  the  army ;  and  one 
of  his  most  characteristic  points  through  life,  shown 
in  many  very  different  forms,  was  his  pugnacity,  his 
keen  perception  of  the  '"''  certa7ninis  gaudia  "  : — 

"  There  is  something  of  combativeness  in  me,"  he  writes, 
"which  prevents  the  whole  vigour  being  drawn  out,  except 
when  I  have  an  antagonist  to  deal  with,  a  falsehood  to 
quell,  or  a  wrong  to  avenge.  Never  till  then  does  my 
mind  feel  quite  alive.  Could  I  have  chosen  my  own 
period  of  the  world  to  have  lived  in,  and  my  own  type 
of  life,  it  should  be  the  feudal  ages,  and  the  life  of  a 
Cid,  the  redresser  of  wrongs." 

"  On  the  other  hand,"  writes  his  biographer,  "  when 
he  met  men  who  despised  Christianity,  or  who,  like 
the  Roman  Catholics,  held  to  doctrines  which  he 
believed  untrue,  this  very  enthusiasm  and  unconscious 
excitement  swept  him  sometimes  beyond  himself.  He 
could  not  moderate  his  indignation  down  to  the 
cool  level  of  ordinary  life.  Hence  he  was  wanting  at 
this  time  in  the  wise  tolerance  which  formed  so  con- 
spicuous a  feature  of  his  maturer  manhood.  He  held 
to  his  own  views  with  pertinacity.  He  believed  them  to 
be  true  ;  and  he  almost  refused  to  allow  the  possibility 
of  the  views  of  others  having  truth  in  them  also.  He 
was  more  or  less  one-sided  at  this  period.  With  the 
Roman  Catholic  religion  it  was  war  to  the  death,  not  in 
his  later  mode  of  warfare,  by  showing  the  truth  which 
lay  beneath  the  error,  but  by  denouncing  the  error.      He 


XV  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON  257 

seems  invariably,  with  tlie  pugnacity  of  a  young  man,  to 
have  attacked  their  faith  ;  and  the  mode  in  which  this 
was  done  was  starthngly  different  from  that  which  after- 
wards he  adopted." 

He  yielded,  after  considerable  resistance,  to  the 
wishes  and  advice  of  his  friends,  that  he  should  pre- 
pare for  orders.  "With  a  romantic  instinct  of  self- 
sacrifice,"  says  his  biographer,  "he  resolved  to  give 
up  the  idea  of  his  whole  life."  This  we  can  quite 
understand ;  but  with  that  propensity  of  biographers 
to  credit  their  subject  with  the  desirable  qualities 
which  it  may  be  supposed  that  they  ought  to  have, 
besides  those  which  they  really  have,  the  editor  pro- 
ceeds to  observe  that  this  would  scarcely  have 
happened  had  not  Mr.  Robertson's  '•^characteristic 
self-distrust  disposed  him  to  believe  that  he  was  him- 
self the  worst  judge  of  his  future  profession."  This 
is  the  way  in  which  the  true  outline  of  a  character  is 
blurred  and  confused,  in  order  to  say  something 
proper  and  becoming.  Self-distrust  was  not  among 
the  graces  or  weaknesses  of  Mr.  Robertson's  nature, 
unless  indeed  we  mistake  for  it  the  anxiety  which 
even  the  stoutest  heart  may  feel  at  a  crisis,  or  the 
dissatisfaction  which  the  proudest  may  feel  at  the 
interval  between  attempt  and  achievement. 

He  was  an  undergraduate  at  Brasenose  at  the 
height  of  the  Oxford  movement.  He  w-as  known 
there,  so  far  as  he  was  known  at  all,  as  a  keen  partisan 
of  the  Evangelical  school ;  and  though  no  one  then 
suspected  the  power  which  was   really  in  him,  his 

VOL.  II  S 


258  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON  xv 

party,  not  rich  in  men  of  strength  or  promise,  made 
the  most  of  a  recruit  who  showed  abiUty  and  entered 
heartily  into  their  watchwords,  and,  it  must  be  said, 
their  rancour.  He  was  conspicuous  among  the  young 
men  of  his  standing  for  the  forwardness  with  which 
he  took  his  side  against  "Tractarianism,"  and  the 
vehemence  of  his  disUke  of  it,  and  for  the  almost 
ostentatious  and  defiant  prominence  which  he  gave 
to  the  convictions  and  social  habits  of  his  school. 
He  expressed  his  scorn  and  disgust  at  the  "  donnish- 
ness," the  coldness,  the  routine,  the  want  of  heart, 
which  was  all  that  he  could  see  at  Oxford  out  of  the 
one  small  circle  of  his  friends.  He  despised  the 
Oxford  course  of  work,  and  would  have  nothing 
more  to  do  with  it  than  he  could  help — as  he  lived 
to  regret  afterwards.  Yet  even  then  he  was  in  his 
tastes  and  the  instinctive  tendencies  of  his  mind  above 
his  party.  He  was  an  admiring  reader  of  Wordsworth 
and  Shelley;  he  felt  the  strength  of  Aristotle  and 
Plato ;  he  is  said  to  have  appreciated  Mr.  Newman's 
preaching,  and  to  have  gallantly  defended  what  he 
admired  in  him  and  his  friends.  His  editor,  indeed, 
Mr.  Brooke,  appears  to  be  a  little  divided  and 
embarrassed,  between  his  wish  to  enforce  Mr. 
Robertson's  largeness  of  mind  and  heart,  and  his 
fear  of  giving  countenance  to  suspicions  that  he  was 
ever  so  little  inclined  to  "  High  Churchism " ;  be- 
tween his  desire  to  show  that  Mr.  Robertson  estimated 
the  High  Church  leaders  as  much  as  an  intelligent 
man  ought,  and  disliked  their  system  as  much  as  a 


XV  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON  259 

sound-thinking  Christian  ought.  We  should  have 
thought  that  he  need  not  be  so  solicitous  to  "  set  at 
rest  the  question  about  Mr.  Robertson's  High  Church 
tendencies."  "I  hate  High  Churchism,"  was  one  of 
his  latest  declarations,  when  professing  his  sympathy 
with  individual  High  Churchmen.  One  thing,  how- 
ever, is  quite  clear — that  in  his  early  life  his  partisan- 
ship w^as  thoroughgoing  and  unflinching  enough  to 
satisfy  the  fiercest  and  most  fanatical  of  their 
opponents.  Such  a  representation  as  this  is  simply 
misleading : — 

The  almost  fierceness  with  which  he  speaks  against 
the  Tract  school  is  proof  in  him  of  the  strength  of  the 
attraction  it  possessed  for  him,  just  as  afterwards  at 
Brighton  his  attacks  on  Evangelicalism  are  proof  of 
the  strength  with  which  he  once  held  to  that  form  of 
Christianity,  and  the  force  of  the  reaction  with  which 
he  abandoned  it  for  ever.  Out  of  these  two  reactions — 
when  their  necessary  ultra  tendencies  had  been  mellowed 
down  by  time — emerged  at  last  the  clearness  and  the  just 
balance  of  principles  with  which  he  taught  during  1848 
and  the  following  years,  at  Brighton.  He  had  probed 
both  schools  of  theological  thought  to  their  recesses, 
and  had  found  them  wanting.  He  spoke  of  what  he 
knew  when  he  protested  against  both.  He  spoke  also 
of  what  he  knew  when  he  publicly  recognised  the  Spirit 
of  all  good  moving  in  the  lives  of  those  whose  opinions  he 
believed  to  be  erroneous. 

It  is  absurd  to  say,  because  he  sometimes  spoke  of 
the  "  danger"  he  had  been  in  from  " Tractarianism, " 


2G0  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON  xv 

that  he  had  felt  in  equal  degree  the  "strength  of 
attraction  "  towards  the  one  school  and  towards  the 
other,  and  it  is  equally  absurd  to  talk  of  his  "  having 
probed  both  to  their  recesses."  He  read,  and  argued, 
and  discussed  the  pamphlets  of  the  controversy — the 
"replies,"  Mr.  Brooke  says,  with  more  truth  probably 
than  he  thought  of  in  using  the  word — like  other 
undergraduates  who  took  interest  in  what  was  going 
on,  and  thought  themselves  fit  to  choose  their  side. 
With  his  tutor  and  friend,  Mr.  Churton,  he  read 
Taylor's  Aficient  Christia?iity^  carefully  looking  out  the 
passages  from  the  Fathers.  "  I  am  reading  the  early 
Church  history  with  Golightly,"  he  says,  "which  is  a 
very  great  advantage,  as  he  has  a  fund  of  general 
information  and  is  a  close  reader."  But  we  must 
doubt  whether  this  involved  "probing  to  the  recesses" 
the  "  Tractarian "  side  of  the  question.  And  we 
distrust  the  depth  and  the  judgment,  and  the  impar- 
tiality also  of  a  man  who  is  said  to  have  read  Newman's 
sermons  continually  with  delight  to  the  day  of  his 
death,  and  by  whom  no  book  was  more  carefully 
studied  and  more  highly  honoured  than  The  Christian 
Year,  and  who  yet  to  the  last  could  see  nothing 
better  in  the  Church  movement  as  a  whole  than, 
according  to  the  vulgar  view  of  it,  a  revival  of  forms 
partly  useful,  partly  hurtful.  It  seems  to  us  the  great 
misfortune  of  his  life,  and  one  which  exercised  its 
evil  influence  on  him  to  the  end,  that,  thrown  young 
into  the  narrowest  and  weakest  of  religious  schools, 
he  found  it  at  first  so  congenial  to  his  vehement  tem- 


XV  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON  261 

perament,  that  he  took  so  kindly  to  certain  of  its  more 
unnatural  and  ungenerous  ways,  and  thus  was  cut  off 
from  the  larger  and  healthier  influences  of  the  society 
round  him.  Those  were  days  when  older  men  than 
he  took  their  side  too  precipitately ;  but  he  found 
himself  encouraged,  even  as  an  undergraduate,  to  dog- 
matise, to  be  positive,  to  hate,  to  speak  evil.  He 
learnt  the  lesson  too  well.  This  is  the  language  of  an 
undergraduate  at  the  end  of  his  university  course  : — 

But  I  seem  this  term  to  have  in  a  measure  waked 
out  of  a  long  trance,  partly  caused  by  my  own  gross 
inconsistencies,  and  partly  by  the  paralysing  effects  of 
this  Oxford-delusion  heresy,  for  such  it  is  I  feel  per- 
suaded. And  to  know  it  a  man  must  live  here,  and  he 
will  see  the  promising  and  ardent  men  sinking  one  after 
another  in  a  deadly  torpor,  wrapped  up  in  self-contem- 
plation, dead  to  their  Redeemer,  and  useless  to  His 
Church,  under  the  baneful  breath  of  this  accursed  upas 
tree.  I  say  accursed,  because  I  believe  that  St.  Paul 
would  use  the  same  language  to  Oxford  as  he  did  to  the 
Galatian  Church,  "  I  would  they  were  even  cut  off  which 
trouble  you  "  ;  accursed,  because  I  believe  that  the  curse 
of  God  will  fall  on  it.  He  has  denounced  it  on  the 
Papal  heresy,  and  He  is  no  respecter  of  persons,  to 
punish  the  name  and  not  the  reality.  May  He  forgive 
me  if  I  err,  and  lead  me  into  all  truth.  But  I  do  not 
speak  as  one  who  has  been  in  no  danger,  and  therefore 
cannot  speak  very  quietly.  It  is  strange  into  what 
ramifications  the  disbelief  of  external  justification  will 
extend  ;  we  will  make  it  internal,  whether  it  be  by  self- 
mortification,  by  works  of  evangelical  obedience,  or  by 


262  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON  xv 

the  sacraments,  and  that  just  at  the  time  when  we 
suppose  most  that  we  are  magnifying  the  work  of  the 
Lord. 

Mr.  Brooke  rather  likes  to  dw^ell,  as  it  seems  to 
us,  in  an  unreal  and  disproportionate  way,  on  Mr. 
Robertson's  sufferings,  in  the  latter  part  of  his  life, 
from  the  bitter  and  ungenerous  attacks  of  which  he 
was  the  object.  "This  is  the  man,"  he  says  in  one 
place,  "who  was  afterwards  at  Brighton  driven  into 
the  deepest  solitariness  of  heart,  whom  God  thought 
fit  to  surround  with  slander  and  misunderstanding." 
He  w^as,  we  doubt  not,  fiercely  assailed  by  the  Evan- 
gelical party,  which  he  had  left,  and  which  he 
denounced  in  no  gentle  language ;  he  was,  as  we  can 
well  believe,  "  constantly  attacked,  by  some  manfully, 
by  others  in  an  underhand  manner,  and  w^as  the 
victim  of  innuendoes  and  slander."  We  cannot,  how- 
ever, help  thinking  that  Mr.  Brooke  unconsciously 
exaggerates  the  solitariness  and  want  of  sympathy 
which  w^ent  with  all  this.  Mr.  Robertson  had,  and 
knew  that  he  had,  his  ardent  and  enthusiastic  ad- 
mirers as  well  as  his  worrying  and  untiring  opponents. 
But  what  we  remark  is  this.  It  was  the  measure  which 
he  had  meted  out  to  others,  in  the  fierceness  of  his 
zeal  for  Evangelicalism,  which  the  Evangelicals  after- 
wards meted  out  to  him.  They  did  not  more  talk 
evil  of  what  they  knew  not  and  had  taken  no  real 
pains  to  understand,  than  he  had  done  of  a  body  of 
men  as  able,  as  well-instructed,  as  deep-thinking,  as 
brave,  as  earnest  as  himself  in  their  war  against  sin 


XV  LIFE  OF  FEEDERICK  ROBERTSON  263 

and  worldliness.  The  stupidity,  the  perverse  ill- 
nature,  the  resolute  ignorance,  the  audacious  and 
fanatical  application  of  Scripture  condemnations,  the 
reckless  judging  without  a  desire  to  do  justice,  which 
he  felt  and  complained  of  so  bitterly  when  turned 
against  himself,  he  had  sanctioned  and  largely  shared 
in  when  the  same  party  w^hich  attacked  him  in  the 
end  attacked  the  earlier  revivers  of  thoughtful  and 
earnest  religion.  Nor  do  we  find  that  he  ever  ex- 
pressed regret  for  a  vehemence  of  condemnation 
which  his  after-knowledge  must  have  shown  him  that 
he  had  no  business  to  pass,  because,  even  if  he  after- 
wards adhered  to  it,  he  had  originally  passed  it  on 
utterly  false  and  inadequate  grounds.  He  only 
became  as  fierce  against  the  Evangelicals  as  he  had 
been  against  the  followers  of  Mr.  Newman.  He 
never  unlearnt  the  habit  of  harsh  reprobation  which 
his  Evangelical  friends  had  encouraged.  He  only 
transferred  its  full  force  against  themselves. 

He  left  Oxford  and  began  his  ministry,  first  at 
Winchester,  and  then  at  Cheltenham,  full  of  Evan- 
gelical formulae  and  Evangelical  narrow  zeal.  It 
does  not  appear  that,  except  as  an  earnest  hard- 
working clergyman,  he  was  in  any  way  distinguished 
from  numbers  of  the  same  class,  though  we  are  quite 
willing  to  believe  that  even  then  his  preaching,  in 
warmth  and  vigour,  was  above  the  average.  But  as 
he,  or  his  biographer,  says,  he  had  not  yet  really 
begun  to  think.  When  he  began  to  think,  he  did  so 
with  the  rapidity,  the  intensity,  the  impatient  fervid 


264  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSOX  xv 

vehemence  which  lay  all  along  at  the  bottom  of  his 
character.  His  Evangehcal  views  appear  to  have 
snapped  to  pieces  and  dissolved  with  a  violence  and 
sudden  abruptness  entirely  unaccounted  for  by  any- 
thing which  these  volumes  show  us.  He  read  Carlyle ; 
but  so  did  many  other  people.  He  found  the  reli- 
gious world  at  Cheltenham  not  so  pure  as  he  had 
imagined  it ;  but  this  is  what  must  have  happened 
anywhere,  and  is  not  enough  to  account  for  such  a 
complete  revolution  of  belief.  He  had  a  friend 
deeply  read  in  German  philosophy  and  criticism  who 
is  said  to  have  exercised  influence  on  him.  Still,  we 
repeat,  the  steps  and  processes  of  the  change  from 
the  Evangelicalism  of  Cheltenham  to  a  condition,  at 
first,  of  almost  absolute  doubt,  are  very  imperfectly 
explained : — 

These  letters  were  written  in  1843.  l^i  the  following 
year  doubts  and  questionings  began  to  stir  in  his  mind. 
He  could  not  get  rid  of  them.  They  were  forced  upon 
him  by  his  reading  and  his  intercourse  with  men.  They 
grew  and  tortured  him.  His  teaching  in  the  pulpit 
altered,  and  it  became  painful  to  him  to  preach.  He 
was  reckoned  of  the  Evangelical  school,  and  he  began 
to  feel  that  his  position  was  becoming  a  false  one.  He 
felt  the  excellence  and  earnestness,  and  gladly  recognised 
the  work  of  the  nobler  portion  of  that  party,  but  he  felt 
also  that  he  must  separate  from  it.  In  his  strong 
reaction  from  its  extreme  tendencies,  he  understood 
with  a  shock  which  upturned  his  whole  inward  life  for  a 
time,    that   the   system   on   which    he   had   founded    his 


XV      LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON     265 

whole  faith  and  work  could  never  be  received  by  him 
again.  Within  its  pale,  for  him,  there  was  henceforward 
neither  life,  peace,  nor  reality.  It  was  not,  however, 
till  almost  the  end  of  his  ministry  at  Cheltenham  that 
this  became  clearly  manifest  to  him.  It  had  been 
growing  slowly  into  a  conviction.  An  outward  blow — 
the  sudden  ruin  of  a  friendship  which  he  had  wrought, 
as  he  imagined,  for  ever  into  his  being — a  blow  from 
which  he  never  afterwards  wholly  recovered — accelerated 
the  inward  crisis,  and  the  result  was  a  period  of  spiritual 
agony  so  awful  that  it  not  only  shook  his  health  to  its 
centre,  but  smote  his  spirit  down  into  so  profound  a 
darkness  that  of  all  his  early  faiths  but  one  remained, 
"  It  must  be  right  to  do  right." 

This  seems  to  have  been  in  1846,  and  in  the 
beginning  of  the  next  year  he  had  already  taken  his 
new  line.  The  explanation  does  not  explain  much. 
We  have  no  right  to  ask  for  more  than  his  friends 
think  fit  to  tell  us  of  this  turning-point  of  his  life. 
But  we  observe  that  this  deeply  important  passage  is 
left  with  but  little  light  and  much  manifest  reticence. 
That  the  crisis  took  place  we  have  his  ow^n  touching 
and  eloquent  words  to  assure  us.  It  left  him  also  as 
firm  in  his  altered  convictions  as  he  had  been  in  his 
old  ones.  What  caused  it,  what  were  its  circum- 
stances and  characteristics,  and  what  affected  its 
course  and  results,  we  can  only  guess.  But  it  was 
decisive  and  it  was  speedy.  He  spent  a  few  months 
in  Germany  in  the  end  of  1846,  and  in  the  beginning 
of  1847  the  Bishop  of  Oxford  was  willing  to  appoint 


2GG  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSOX  xv 

him  to  St.  Ebbe's.  But  his  stay  there  was  short. 
Three  months  afterwards  he  accepted  the  chapel  at 
Brighton    which    he    held    till    his  death  in  August 

1853- 

He  was  now  the  Robertson  whom  all  the  world 

knows,  and  the  change  was  a  most  remarkable  one. 
It  seems  strictly  accurate  to  say  that  he  started  at 
once  into  a  new  man — new  in  all  his  views  and 
tastes ;  new  in  the  singular  burst  of  power  which  at 
once  shows  itself  in  the  keen,  free,  natural  language 
of  his  letters  and  his  other  writings ;  new  in  the  deep 
concentrated  earnestness  of  character  with  which  he 
seemed  to  grasp  his  peculiar  calling  and  function. 
All  the  conventionalities  of  his  old  school,  which 
hung  very  thick  about  him  even  to  the  end  of  his 
Cheltenham  life,  seem  suddenly  to  drop  off,  and 
leave  him,  without  a  trace  remaining  on  his  mind,  in 
the  full  use  and  delight  of  his  new  liberty.  We 
cannot  say  that  we  are  more  inclined  to  agree  with 
him  in  his  later  stage  than  in  his  earlier.  And  the 
rapid  transformation  of  a  most  dogmatic  and  zealous 
Evangelical  into  an  equally  positive  and  enthusiastic 
"  Broad  Churchman "  does  not  seem  a  natural  or 
healthy  process,  and  suggests  impatience  and  self-con- 
fidence more  than  self-command  and  depth.  But  we 
get,  without  doubt,  to  a  real  man — a  man  whose  words 
have  a  meaning,  and  stand  for  real  things ;  whose 
language  no  longer  echoes  the  pale  dreary  common- 
places of  a  school,  but  reveals  thoughts  which  he  has 
thought  for  himself,  and  the  power  of  being  able  "  to 


XV  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON  267 

speak  as  he  will."  His  mind  seems  to  expand,  almost 
at  a  bound,  to  all  the  manifold  variety  of  interests  of 
which  the  world  is  full.  His  letters  on  his  own 
doings,  on  the  books  and  subjects  of  the  day,  on 
the  remarks  or  the  circumstances  of  his  friends,  his 
criticism,  his  satire,  his  controversial  or  friendly  dis- 
cussions, are  full  of  energy,  versatility,  refinement, 
boldness,  and  strength ;  and  his  remarkable  power 
of  clear,  picturesque,  expressive  diction,  not  unworthy 
of  our  foremost  masters  of  English,  appears  all  at 
once,  as  it  were,  full  grown.  It  is  difficult  to  believe, 
as  we  read  the  later  portions  of  his  life,  that  we  are 
reading  about  the  same  man  who  appeared,  so  short 
a  time  before,  at  the  beginning,  to  promise  at  best 
to  turn  into  a  popular  Evangelical  preacher,  above 
the  average,  perhaps,  in  taste  and  power,  but  not 
above  the  average  in  freedom  from  cramping  and 
sour  prejudices. 

Mr.  Robertson  had  hold  of  some  great  truths,  and 
he  appHed  them,  both  in  his  own  thoughts  and 
self-development  and  in  his  popular  teaching,  with 
great  force.  He  realised  two  things  with  a  depth  and 
intensity  which  give  an  awful  Hfe  and  power  to  all  he 
said  about  religion.  He  realised  with  singular  and 
pervading  keenness  that  which  a  greater  man  than  he 
speaks  of  as  the  first  and  the  great  discovery  of  the 
awakened  soul — "the  thought  of  two,  and  two  only, 
supreme  and  luminously  self-evident  beings,  himself 
and  the  Creator."  "Alone  with  God,"  expresses  the 
feeling  which  calmed  his  own  anxieties  and  animated 


268     LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON      xv 

his  religious  appeals  to  others.  And  he  realised  with 
equal  earnestness  the  great  truth  which  is  spoken  of 
by  Mr,  Brooke,  though  in  language  which  to  us  has 
an  unpleasant  sound,  in  the  following  extract : — 

Yet,  notwithstanding  all  this — which  men  called  while 
he  li\ed,  and  now  when  he  is  dead  will  call,  want  of 
a  clear  and  well-defined  system  of  theology — he  had  a 
fixed  basis  for  his  teaching.  It  was  the  Divine-human 
Life  of  Christ.  It  is  the  fourth  principle  mentioned  in 
his  letter,  "  that  belief  in  the  human  character  of  Christ 
must  be  antecedent  to  belief  in  His  divine  origin."  He 
felt  that  an  historical  Christianity  was  absolutely  essential; 
that  only  through  a  visible  life  of  the  Divinest  in  the  flesh 
could  God  become  intelligible  to  men  ;  that  Christ  was 
God's  idea  of  our  nature  realised  ;  that  only  \vhen  we 
fall  back  on  the  glorious  portrait  of  what  has  been,  can 
we  be  delivered  from  despair  of  Humanity  ;  that  in 
Christ  "  all  the  blood  of  all  the  nations  ran,"  and  all  the 
powers  of  man  were  redeemed.  Therefore  he  grasped 
as  the  highest  truth,  on  which  to  rest  life  and  thought, 
the  reality  expressed  in  the  words,  "  the  Word  was  made 
Flesh."  The  Incarnation  was  to  him  the  centre  of  all 
history,  the  blossoming  of  Humanity.  The  Life  which 
followed  the  Incarnation  was  the  explanation  of  the  Life 
of  God,  and  the  only  solution  of  the  problem  of  the  Life 
of  man.  He  did  not  speak  much  of  loving  Christ  ;  his 
love  was  fitly  mingled  with  that  veneration  which  makes 
love  perfect  ;  his  voice  was  solemn,  and  he  paused  before 
he  spoke  His  name  in  common  talk  ;  for  what  that  name 
meant  had  become  the  central  thought  of  his  intellect 
and  the  deepest  realisation  of  his  spirit.      He  had  spent 


XV  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON  269 

a  world  of  study,  of  reverent  meditation,  of  adoring  con- 
templation, on  the  Gospel  history.  Nothing  comes  for- 
ward more  frequently  in  his  letters  than  the  way  in  which 
he  had  entered  into  the  human  life  of  Christ.  To  that 
everything  is  referred — by  that  everything  is  explained. 

In  bringing  home  these  great  truths  to  the  feelings 
of  those  who  had  lived  insensible  to  them  lay  the  chief 
value  of  his  preaching.  He  awakened  men  to  believe 
that  there  w^as  freshness  and  reahty  in  things  which 
they  had  by  use  become  dulled  to.  There  are  no 
doubt  minds  which  rise  to  the  truth  most  naturally 
and  freely  without  the  intervention  of  dogmatic 
expressions,  and  to  these  such  expressions,  as  they 
are  a  limit  and  a  warning,  are  also  felt  as  a  clog.  Mr. 
Robertson's  early  experience  had  made  him  suspicious 
and  irritable  about  dogma  as  such ;  and  he  prided 
himself  on  being  able  to  dispense  with  it,  w^hile  at 
the  same  time  preserving  the  principle  and  inner 
truth  which  it  was  intended  to  convey.  But  in  his 
ostentatious  contempt  of  dogmatic  precision  and 
exactness,  none  but  those  who  have  not  thought 
about  the  matter  will  see  any  proof  of  his  strength 
or  wisdom.  Dogma,  accurate,  subtle,  scientific,  does 
not  prevent  a  mind  of  the  first  order  from  breath- 
ing freshness  of  feeling,  grandeur,  originality,  and 
the  sense  of  reahty,  into  the  exposition  of  the 
truth  which  it  represents.  It  is  no  fetter  except 
to  those  minds  which  in  their  impulsiveness,  their 
self-confidence,  and  their  want  of  adequate  grasp  and 
sustained  force,  most  need  its  salutary  restraint.     And 


270  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON  xv 

no  man  has  a  right,  however  eloquent  and  impressive 
his  speech  may  be,  to  talk  against  dogma  till  he  shows 
that  he  does  not  confound  accuracy  of  statement  with 
conventional  formalism.  Mr.  Robertson  lays  down 
the  law  pretty  confidently  about  the  blunders  of 
everybody  about  him — Tractarian,  Evangelical,  Dis- 
senter, Romanist,  and  Rationalist.  We  must  say  that 
the  impression  of  every  page  of  his  letters  is,  that 
clear  and  "intuitive"  as  he  was,  he  had  not  always 
understood  what  he  condemned.  He  was  especially 
satisfied  with  a  view  of  Baptism  which  he  thought  rose 
above  both  extremes  and  took  in  the  truth  of  both 
while  it  avoided  their  errors.  But  is  it  too  much  to  say 
that  a  man  who,  not  in  the  heat  of  rhetoric,  but  when 
preparing  candidates  for  Confirmation,  and  piquing 
himself  on  his  freedom  from  all  prejudice,  deliberately 
describes  the  common  Church  view  of  Baptism  as 
implying  a  "  magical "  change,  and  actually  illustrates 
what  he  means  by  the  stories  of  magical  changes  in 
the  Arabian  Nights — who  knowing,  or  able  to  read, 
all  that  has  been  said  by  divines  on  the  subject  from 
the  days  of  Augustine,  yet  commits  himself  to  the 
assertion  that  this  is  in  fact  what  they  hold  and 
teach — is  it  too  much  to  say  that  such  a  man, 
whatever  may  be  his  other  gifts,  has  forfeited  all 
claim  to  be  considered  capable  of  writing  and  ex- 
pressing himself  with  accuracy,  truth,  and  distinctness 
on  theological  questions  ?  And  if  theological  questions 
are  to  be  dealt  with,  ought  they  not  to  be  dealt  with 
accurately,  and  not  loosely  ? 


XV  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON  271 

But  we  have  lingered  too  long  over  these  volumes. 
They  are  very  instructive,  sometimes  very  elevating, 
almost  always  very  touching.  The  life  which  they 
describe  greatly  wanted  discipline,  self-restraint, 
and  the  wise  and  manly  fear  of  overrating  one's 
own  novelties.  But  we  see  in  it  a  life  consecrated 
to  duty,  fulfilled  with  much  pain  and  self-sacrifice, 
and  adorned  by  warm  and  deep  affections,  by 
vigour  and  refinement  of  thought,  and  earnest  love 
for  truth  and  purity.  No  one  can  help  feeling  his 
profound  and  awful  sense  of  things  unseen,  though  in 
the  philosophy  by  which  he  sought  to  connect  things 
seen  and  things  unseen,  we  cannot  say  that  we  can 
have  much  confidence.  We  have  only  one  concluding 
remark  to  make,  and  that  is  not  on  him  but  on  his 
biographer.  An  exaggerated  tone,  as  we  have  said, 
seems  to  us  to  pervade  the  book.  There  is  what 
seems  to  us  an  unhealthy  attempt  to  create  in  the 
reader  an  impression  of  the  exceptional  severity  of 
the  sufferings  of  Mr.  Robertson's  life,  of  his  loneliness, 
of  his  persecutions.  But  in  this  point  much  may 
fairly  be  pardoned  to  the  affection  of  a  friend.  What, 
however,  we  can  less  excuse  is  the  want  of  good 
feeling  with  which  Mr.  Brooke,  in  his  account  of  Mr. 
Robertson's  last  days,  allows  himself  to  give  an  ex  parte 
account  of  a  dispute  between  Mr.  Robertson  and  the 
Vicar  of  Brighton,  about  the  appointment  of  a  curate, 
and  not  simply  to  insinuate,  but  distinctly  declare  that 
this  dispute  with  its  result  was  the  fatal  stroke  which, 
in  his  state  of  ill-health,  hastened  his  death.     We  say 


272  LIFE  OF  FREDERICK  ROBERTSON  xv 

nothing  about  the  rights  of  the  story,  for  we  never 
heard  anything  of  them  but  what  Mr.  Brooke  tells 
us.  But  there  is  an  appearance  of  vindictiveness  in 
putting  it  on  record  with  this  particular  aspect  which 
nothing  in  the  story  itself  seems  to  us  to  justify.  In 
describing  Mr.  Robertson's  departure  from  Chelten- 
ham, Mr.  Brooke  has  plainly  thought  right  to  use 
much  reticence.  He  would  have  done  well  to  have 
used  the  same  reticence  about  these  quarrels  at 
Brighton. 


XVI 

LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  i 

BuNSEN  was  really  one  of  those  persons,  more 
common  two  centuries  ago  than  now,  who  could 
belong  as  much  to  an  adopted  country  as  to  that  in 
which  they  were  born  and  educated.  A  German  of 
the  Germans,  he  yet  succeeded  in  also  making  himself 
at  home  in  England,  in  appreciating  English  interests, 
in  assimilating  English  thought  and  traditions,  and 
exercising  an  important  influence  at  a  critical  time  on 
one  extremely  important  side  of  English  life  and 
opinion.  He  was  less  felicitous  in  allying  the  German 
with  the  Englishman,  perhaps  from  personal  peculi- 
arities of  impatience,  self-assertion,  and  haste,  than 
one  who  has  since  trodden  in  his  steps  and  realised 
more  completely  and  more  splendidly  some  of  the 
great  designs  which  floated  before  his  mind.  But  few 
foreigners  have  gained  more  fairly,  by  work  and  by 
sympathy,  the  droit  de  cite  in  England  than  Bunsen. 
It  is  a  great  pity  that  books  must  be  so  long  and 

1  A  Memoir  of  Baron  Bunsen.    By  his  Widow,  Baroness  Bunsen. 
Saturday  Review,  2nd  May  1868. 

VOL.  II  T 


274  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  xvi 

so  bulky,  and  though  Bunsen's  life  was  a  very  full 
and  active  one  in  all  matters  of  intellectual  interest, 
and  in  some  of  practical  interest  also,  we  cannot  help 
thinking  that  his  biography  would  have  gained  by 
greater  exercise  of  self-denial  on  the  part  of  his 
biographer.  It  is  altogether  too  prolix,  and  the  dis- 
tinction is  not  sufficiently  observed  between  what  is 
interesting  simply  to  the  Bunsen  family  and  their 
friends,  and  w^hat  is  interesting  to  the  public.  One 
of  the  points  in  which  biographers,  and  the  present 
author  among  the  number,  make  mistakes,  is  in  their 
use  of  letters.  They  never  know  when  to  stop  in 
giving  correspondence.  If  we  had  only  one  or  two 
letters  of  a  remarkable  man,  they  would  be  worth 
printing,  even  if  they  were  very  much  like  other 
people's  letters.  But  when  we  have  bundles  and 
letter-books  without  end  to  select  from,  selection,  in 
a  work  professedly  biographical,  becomes  advisable. 
We  want  types  and  specimens  of  a  man's  letters; 
and  when  the  specimen  has  been  given,  we  want  no 
more,  unless  what  is  given  is  for  its  own  sake  remark- 
able. A  great  number  of  Bunsen's  early  letters  are 
printed.  Some  of  them  are  of  much  interest,  showing 
how  early  the  germs  were  formed  of  ideas  and  plans 
which  occupied  his  life,  and  what  were  the  influences 
by  which  he  was  surrounded,  and  how  he  comported 
himself  in  regard  to  them.  But  many  more  of  these 
letters  are  what  any  young  man  of  thought  and  of  an 
affectionate  nature  might  have  written ;  and  we  do 
not  want  to  have  it  shown  us,  over  and  over  again, 


XVI  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  275 

merely  that  Bunsen  was  thoughtful  and  affectionate. 
A  wise  and  severe  economy  in  this  matter  would  have 
produced  at  least  the  same  effect,  at  much  less  cost 
to  the  reader. 

Bunsen  was  born  in  1791,  at  Corbach,  in  the  little 
principality  of  Waldeck,  and  grew  up  under  the 
severe  and  simple  training  of  a  frugal  German  house- 
hold, and  with  a  solid  and  vigorous  German  education. 
He  became  in  time  Heyne's  pupil  at  Gottingen,  and 
very  early  showed  the  qualities  which  distinguished 
him  in  his  after  life — restless  eagerness  after  know- 
ledge and  vast  powers  of  labour,  combined  with  large 
and  ambitious,  and  sometimes  vague,  ideas,  and  with 
depth  and  fervour  of  religious  sentiment.  He  entered 
on  life  when  the  reaction  against  the  cold  rationalistic 
theories  of  the  age  before  him  was  stimulated  by  the 
excitement  of  the  war  of  liberation  ;  and  in  his  deep 
and  supreme  interest  in  the  Bible  he  kept  to  the  last 
the  stamp  which  he  then  received.  More  interesting 
than  the  recollections  of  a  distinguished  man's  youth 
by  his  friends  after  he  has  become  distinguished — 
which  are  seldom  quite  natural  and  not  always  trust- 
worthy— are  the  contemporary  records  of  the  impres- 
sions made  on  him  in  his  youth  by  those  who  were 
distinguished  men  when  he  was  young.  In  some 
of  Bunsen's  letters  we  have  such  impressions.  Thus 
he  writes  of  Heyne  in  18 13  : — 

Poor  and  lonely  did  I  arrive  in  this  place  [Gottingen]. 
Heyne  received  me,  guided  me,  bore  with  me,  encour- 
aged me,  showed  me  in  himself  the  example  of  a  high  and 


276  LIFE  OF  BAROX  BUXSEN  xvi 

noble  energy,  and  indefatigable  activity  in  a  calling  which 
was  not  that  to  which  his  merit  entitled  him.  He  might 
have  superintended  and  administered  and  maintained  an 
entire  kingdom  without  more  effort  and  with  yet  greater 
efficiency  than  the  University  for  which  he  lived  ;  he  was 
too  great  for  a  mere  philologer,  and  in  general  for  a  pro- 
fessor of  mere  learning  in  the  age  into  which  he  was  cast, 
and  he  was  more  distinguished  in  every  other  way  than 
in  this.  .  .  .  And  what  has  he  established  or  founded  at 
the  cost  of  this  exertion  of  faculties  ?  Learning  annihi- 
lates itself,  and  the  most  perfect  is  the  first  submerged  ; 
for  the  next  age  scales  with  ease  the  height  which  cost 
the  preceding  the  full  vigour  of  life.  Yet  two  things 
remain  of  him  and  will  not  perish — the  one,  the  tribute 
left  by  his  free  spirit  to  the  finest  productions  of  the 
human  mind  ;  and  what  he  felt,  thought,  and  has  im- 
mortalised in  many  men  of  excellence  gone  before.  Read 
his  explanations  of  Tischbein's  engravings  from  Homer, 
his  last  preface  to  Virgil,  and  especially  his  oration  on 
the  death  of  Miiller,  and  you  will  understand  what  I 
mean.  I  speak  not  of  his  pohtical  instinct,  made  evident 
in  his  survey  of  the  public  and  private  life  of  the  ancients. 
The  other  memorial  which  will  subsist  of  him,  more 
warm  in  life  than  the  first,  is  the  remembrance  of  his 
gen'erosity,  to  which  numbers  owe  a  deep  obligation. 

And  of  Schelling,  about  the  same  time,  whom  he 
had  just  seen  in  Munich  : — 

Schelling  before  all  must  be  mentioned  as  having 
received  me  well,  after  his  fashion,  giving  me  frequent 
occasions  of  becoming  acquainted  with  his  philosophical 
views  and  judgments,  in  his  own  original  and  peculiar 


XVI  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  277 

manner.  His  mode  of  disputation  is  rough  and  angular  ; 
his  peremptoriness  and  his  paradoxes  terrible.  Once  he 
undertook  to  explain  animal  magnetism,  and  for  this 
purpose  to  give  an  idea  of  Time,  from  which  resulted 
that  all  is  present  and  in  existence — the  Present  as 
existing  in  the  actual  moment ;  the  Future,  as  existing 
in  a  future  moment.  When  I  demanded  the  proof, 
he  referred  me  to  the  word  zj",  which  applies  to  existence, 
in  the  sentence  that  "  this  is  future."  Seckendorf,  who  was 
present  (with  him  I  have  become  closely  acquainted,  to 
my  great  satisfaction),  attempted  to  draw  attention  to  the 
confounding  the  subjective  {i.e.  him  who  pronounces  that 
sentence)  with  the  objective ;  or,  rather,  to  point  out  a 
simple  grammatical  misunderstanding — in  short,  declared 
the  position  impossible.  "Well,  replied  Schelling  drily, 
"  you  have  not  understood  me."  Two  Professors  (his 
worshippers),  who  were  present,  had  meanwhile  endeav- 
oured by  their  exclamations,  "  Only  observe,  all  is, 
all  exists''''  (to  which  the  wife  of  Schelling,  a  clever 
woman,  assented),  to  help  me  into  conviction  ;  and  a 
vehement  beating  the  air — for  arguing  and  holding  fast 
by  any  firm  point  were  out  of  the  question — would  have 
arisen,  if  I  had  not  contrived  to  escape  by  giving  a  play- 
ful turn  to  the  conversation.  I  am  perfectly  aware  that 
Schelling  cotild  have  expressed  and  carried  through  his 
real  opinion  far  better — i.e.  rationally.  I  tell  the  anec- 
dote merely  to  give  an  idea  of  his  manner  in  conversation. 

At  Gottingen  he  was  one  of  a  remarkable  set,  com- 
prising Lachmann,  Liicke,  Brandis,  and  some  others, 
thought  as  much  of  at  the  time  as  their  friends,  but 
who  failed  to  make  their  way  to  the  front  ranks  of  the 


278  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  xvi 

world.  Like  others  of  his  countrymen,  Bunsen  began 
to  find  "  that  the  world's  destinies  were  not  without 
their  effect  on  him,"  and  to  feel  dissatisfied  with  the 
comparatively  narrow  sphere  of  even  German  learning. 
The  thought  grew,  and  took  possession  of  him,  of 
"bringing  over,  into  his  knowledge  and  into  his 
fatherland,  the  solemn  and  distant  East,"  and  to 
"  draw  the  East  into  the  study  of  the  entire  course  of 
humanity  (particularly  of  European,  and  more  especi- 
ally of  Teutonic  humanity),"  making  Germany  the 
"  central  point  of  this  study."  Vast  plans  of  philo- 
logical and  historical  study,  involving,  as  the  only 
means  then  possible  of  carrying  them  out,  schemes  of 
wide  travel  and  long  sojourn  in  the  East,  opened  on 
him.  Indian  and  Persian  literature,  the  instinctive 
certainty  of  its  connection  with  the  languages  and 
thought  of  the  West,  and  the  imperfection  of  means 
of  study  in  Europe,  drew  him,  as  many  more  were 
drawn  at  the  time,  to  seek  the  knowledge  which  they 
wanted  in  foreign  and  distant  lands.  With  Bunsen, 
this  wide  and  combined  study  of  philology,  history, 
and  philosophy,  which  has  formed  one  of  the  charac- 
teristic pursuits  of  our  time,  was  from  the  first  con- 
nected with  the  study  of  the  Bible  as  its  central 
point.  In  1815  came  a  decisive  turning-point  in  his 
life — his  acquaintance,  and  the  beginning  of  his  close 
connection,  with  Nicbuhr,  at  Berlin ;  and  from  this 
time  he  felt  himself  a  Prussian.  "That  State  in 
Northern  Germany,"  he  writes  to  Brandis  in  181 5, 
"  which  gladly  receives  every  German,  from  where- 


XVI  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  279 

soever  he  may  come,  and  considers  every  one  thus 
entering  as  a  citizen  born,  is  the  true  Germany  "  : — 

That  such  a  State  [he  proceeds,  in  the  true  Bismarckian 
spirit]  should  prove  inconvenient  to  others  of  inferior 
importance,  which  persist  in  continuing  their  isolated 
existence,  regardless  of  the  will  of  Providence  and  of 
the  general  good,  is  of  no  consequence  whatever ;  nor 
even  does  it  matter  that,  in  its  present  management,  there 
are  defects  and  imperfections.  .  .  .  We  intend  to  be 
in  Berlin  in  three  weeks  ;  and  there  (in  Prussia)  am  I 
resolved  to  fix  my  destinies. 

After  reading  Persian  for  a  short  time  in  Paris  with 
De  Sacy,  and  after  the  failure  of  a  plan  of  travel  with 
Mr.  Astor  of  New  York,  Bunsen  joined  Niebuhr  at 
Florence  in  the  end  of  1816,  and  went  on  with  him 
to  Rome,  w^here  Niebuhr  was  Prussian  envoy.  There, 
enjoying  Niebuhr's  society,  "  equally  sole  in  his  kind 
with  Rome,"  he  took  up  his  abode,  and  plunged  into 
study.  He  gave  up  his  plans  of  Oriental  travel, 
finding  he  could  do  all  that  he  wanted  without  them. 
Too  much  a  student,  as  he  writes  to  a  friend,  to 
think  of  marrying,  which  he  could  not  do  "without 
impairing  his  whole  scheme  of  mental  development," 
he  nevertheless  found  his  fate  in  an  English  lady, 
Miss  Waddington,  who  became  his  wdfe.  And, 
finally,  when  the  health  of  his  friend  Brandis, 
Niebuhr's  secretary  in  the  Prussian  Legation,  broke 
down,  Bunsen  took  his  place,  and  entered  on  that 
combined  path  of  study  and  diplomacy  in  which  he 
continued  for  the  greater  part  of  his  life. 


280  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  xvi 

It  may  be  questioned  whether  Bunsen's  career 
answered  altogether  successfully  to  what  he  proposed 
to  himself,  or  was  in  fact  all  that  his  friends  and  he 
himself  thought  it ;  but  it  was  eminently  one  in 
which  from  the  first  he  had  laid  down  for  himself  a 
plan  of  life  which  he  tenaciously  followed  through 
many  changes  and  varieties  of  work,  without  ever 
losing  sight  of  the  purpose  with  which  he  began. 
He  piqued  himself  on  having  early  seen  that  a  man 
ought  to  have  an  object  to  which  to  devote  his  whole 
life — "  be  it  a  dictionary  like  Johnson's  or  a  history 
like  Gibbon's  " — and  on  having  discerned  and  chosen 
his  own  object.  And  at  an  early  time  of  his  life  in 
Rome  he  draws  an  outline  of  thought  and  inquiry, 
destined  to  break  off  into  many  different  labours,  in 
very  much  the  same  language  in  which  he  might  have 
described  it  in  the  last  year  of  his  life  : — 

The  coJiscioiisiiess  of  God  i?i  the  viiftd  of  i?ia?t,  and 
that  which  in  a?td  through  that  co7isciousness  He  has 
accomplished^  especially  in  language  a?td  7'eligioft^  this 
was  from  the  earliest  time  before  my  mind.  After  having 
awhile  fancied  to  attain  my  point,  sometimes  here,  some- 
times there,  at  length  (it  was  in  the  Christmas  holidays 
of  1812,  after  having  gained  the  prize  in  November)  I 
made  a  general  and  comprehensive  plan.  I  wished  to  go 
through  and  represent  heathen  antiquity,  in  its  principal 
phases,  in  three  great  periods  of  the  world's  history, 
according  to  its  languages,  its  religious  conceptions,  and 
its  political  institutions  ;  first  of  all  in  the  East,  where 
the  earliest  expressions  in  each  are  highly  remarkable, 


XVI  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  281 

although  little  known  ;  then  in  the  second  great  epoch, 
among  the  Greeks  and  Romans  ;  thirdly,  among  the 
Teutonic  nations,  who  put  an  end  to  the  Roman  Empire. 

At  first  I  thought  of  Christianity  only  as  something 
which  every  one,  like  the  mother  tongue,  knows  in- 
tuitively, and  therefore  not  as  the  object  of  a  peculiar 
study.  But  in  January  1 8 1 6,  when  I  for  the  last  time 
took  into  consideration  all  that  belonged  to  my  plan,  and 
wrote  it  down,  I  arrived  at  this  conclusion,  that  as  God 
had  caused  the  conception  of  Himself  to  be  developed  in 
the  mind  of  man  in  a  twofold  manner,  the  one  through 
revelation  to  the  Jewish  people  through  their  patriarchs, 
the  other  through  reason  in  the  heathen  ;  so  also  must 
the  inquiry  and  representation  of  this  development  be 
twofold  ;  and  as  God  had  kept  these  two  ways  for  a 
length  of  time  independent  and  separate,  so  should  we, 
in  the  course  of  the  examination,  separate  knowledge 
from  man,  and  his  development  from  the  doctrine  of 
revelation  and  faith,  firmly  trusting  that  God  in  the  end 
would  bring  about  the  union  of  both.  This  is  now  also 
my  firm  conviction,  that  we  must  not  mix  them  or  bring 
them  together  forcibly,  as  many  have  done  with  well- 
meaning  zeal  but  unclear  views,  and  as  many  in  Germany 
with  impure  designs  are  still  doing. 

The  design  had  its  interruptions,  both  intellectual 
and  practical.  The  plan  was  an  ambitious  one,  too 
"mbitious  for  Bunsen's  time  and  powers,  or  even 
^  probably  for  our  own  more  advanced  stage  of  know- 
ledge ;  and  Bunsen  ever  found  it  hard  to  resist  the 
attractions  of  a  new  object  of  interest,  and  did  not 


282  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  xvi 

always  exhaust  it,  though  he  seldom  touched  anything 
without  throwing  light  on  it.  Thus  he  was  drawn  by 
circumstances  to  devote  a  good  deal  of  time,  more 
than  he  intended,  to  the  mere  antiquarianism  of  Rome. 
By  and  by  he  found  himself  succeeding  Niebuhr  as 
the  diplomatic  representative  of  Prussia  at  Rome. 
And  his  attempt  to  meet  the  needs  of  his  own  strong 
devotional  feehngs  by  giving  more  warmth  and 
interest  to  the  German  services  at  the  embassy,  "the 
congregation  on  the  Capitoline  Hill,"  led  him,  step  by 
step,  to  those  wider  schemes  for  liturgical  reform 
which  influenced  so  importantly  the  course  of  his 
fortunes.  They  brought  him,  a  young  and  unknown 
man,  with  little  more  than  Niebuhr's  good  word,  into 
direct  and  confidential  communication  with  the  King 
of  Prussia,  who  was  then  intent  on  plans  of  the  same 
kind,  and  who  recognised  in  Bunsen,  after  some 
preliminary  jealousy  and  misgivings,  the  man  most 
fitted  to  assist  in  carrying  them  out.  But  though 
Bunsen,  who  started  with  the  resolve  of  being  both  a 
student  and  a  scholar,  was  driven,  as  he  thought 
against  his  will,  into  paths  which  led  him  deeper  and 
deeper  into  |!)ublic  life  and  diplomacy,  his  early  plans 
were  never  laid  aside  even  under  the  stress  of  official 
employment.  Perhaps  it  may  be  difficult  to  strike 
the  balance  of  what  they  lost  or  gained  by  it. 

The  account  of  his  life  at  Rome  contains  much 
that  is  interesting.  There  is  the  curious  mixture  of 
sympathy  and  antipathy  in  Bunsen's  mind  for  the 
place  itself;  the  antipathy  of  a  German,  a  Protestant, 


XVI  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  283 

and  a  free  inquirer,  for  the  Roman,  the  old  Catholic, 
the  narrow,  timid,  traditional  spirit  which  pervaded 
everything  in  the  great  seat  of  clerical  and  Papal 
government ;  and  the  sympathy,  scarcely  less  intense, 
not  merely,  or  in  the  first  place,  for  the  classical 
aspects  of  Rome,  but  for  its  religious  character,  as 
still  the  central  point  of  Christendom,  full  of  the 
memorials  and  the  savour  of  the  early  days  of 
Christianity,  mingling  with  what  its  many  centuries  of 
history  have  added  to  them  ;  and  for  all  that  aroused 
the  interest  and  touched  the  mind  of  one  deeply 
busy  with  two  great  religious  problems — the  best 
forms  for  Christian  worship,  and  the  restoration,  if 
possible,  of  some  organisation  and  authority  in 
Protestant  Germany.  For  a  long  time  Bunsen,  like 
his  master  Niebuhr,  was  on  the  best  terms  with 
Cardinals,  Monsignori,  and  Popes.  The  Roman 
services  were  no  objects  to  him  of  abhorrence  or 
indifference.  He  saw,  in  the  midst  of  accretions,  the 
remains  of  the  more  primitive  devotion ;  and  the 
architecture,  the  art,  and  the  music,  to  be  found  only 
in  Rome,  were  to  him  inexhaustible  sources  of  deHght. 
As  may  be  supposed,  letters  like  Bunsen's,  and  the 
recollections  of  his  biographer,  are  full  of  interesting 
gossip ;  notices  of  famous  people,  and  of  things  that 
happened  in  Rome  in  the  days  of  the  Emancipation 
and  Reform  Bills,  Revolutions  of  Naples  in  '20  and 
France  in  '30,  during  the  twenty  years,  from  18 18  to 
1838,  in  which  the  men  of  the  great  war  and  the 
restorations  v/ere  going  off  the  scene,  and  the  men  of 


284  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  xvi 

the  modern  days — Liberals,  High  Churchmen,  Ultra- 
montanes — were  coming  on.  Those  twenty  years,  of 
course,  were  not  without  their  changes  in  Bunsen's 
own  views.  The  man  who  had  come  to  Rome,  in 
position  a  poor  and  obscure  student,  had  grown  into 
the  oracle  of  a  highly  cultivated  society,  whose 
acquaintance  was  eagerly  sought  by  every  one  of 
importance  who  lived  at  Rome  or  visited  it,  and  into 
the  diplomatic  representative  of  one  of  the  great 
Powers.  The  scholar  had  come  to  have,  not  merely 
theories,  but  political  and  ecclesiastical  aims.  The 
disciple  of  Niebuhr,  who  at  one  time  had  seen  all 
things  very  much  as  Niebuhr  saw  them  in  his  sad 
later  days  of  disgust  at  revolution  and  cynical  despair 
of  liberty,  had  come  since  under  the  influence  of 
Arnold,  and,  as  his  letters  to  Arnold  show,  had  taken 
into  his  own  mind  much  of  the  more  generous  and 
hopeful,  though  vague,  teaching  of  that  equally  fervid 
teacher  of  liberaHsm  and  of  religion.  These  letters 
are  of  much  interest.  They  show  the  dreams  and  the 
fears  and  antipathies  of  the  time  ;  they  contain  some 
remarkable  anticipations,  some  equally  remarkable 
miscalculations,  and  some  ideas  and  proposals  which, 
with  our  experience,  excite  our  wonder  that  any  one 
could  have  imagined  them  practicable.  Every  one 
knows  that  Bunsen's  diplomatic  career  at  Rome 
ended  unfortunately.  He  was  mixed  up  with  the 
violent  proceedings  of  the  Prussian  Government  in 
the  dispute  with  the  Archbishop  of  Cologne  about 
marriages  between  Protestants  and  Catholics,  and  he 


XVI  LIFE  OF  BARON  EUNSEN  285 

had  the  misfortune  to  offend  equally  both  his  own 
Court  and  that  of  Rome.  It  is  possible  that,  as  is 
urged  in  the  biography  before  us,  he  was  sacrificed  to 
the  blunders  and  the  enmities  of  powers  above  him. 
But,  for  whatever  reason,  no  clear  account  is  given  of 
the  matter  by  his  biographer,  though  a  good  deal 
is  suggested ;  and  in  the  absence  of  intelligible  ex- 
planations the  conclusion  is  natural  that,  though  he 
may  have  been  ill-used,  he  may  also  have  been 
unequal  to  his  position. 

But  his  ill-success  or  his  ill-usage  at  Rome  was 
more  than  compensated  by  the  results  to  which  it 
may  be  said  to  have  led.  Out  of  it  ultimately  came 
that  which  gave  the  decisive  character  to  Bunsen's 
life — his  settlement  in  London  as  Prussian  Minister. 
On  leaving  Rome  he  came  straight  to  England.  He 
came  full  of  admiration  and  enthusiasm  to  "his 
Ithaca,  his  island  fatherland,"  and  he  was  flattered 
and  delighted  by  the  welcome  he  received,  and  by 
the  power  which  he  perceived  in  himself,  beyond  that 
of  most  foreigners,  to  appreciate  and  enjoy  everything 
English.  He  liked  everything — people,  country,  and 
institutions ;  even,  as  his  biographer  writes,  our  rooks. 
The  zest  of  his  enjoyment  was  not  diminished  by 
his  keen  sense  of  w^hat  appear  to  foreigners  our 
characteristic  defects — the  want  of  breadth  of  interest 
and  boldness  of  speculative  thought  which  accompanies 
so  much  energy  in  public  life  and  so  much  practical 
success  ;  and  he  seems  to  have  felt  in  himself  a  more 
than  ordinary  fitness  to  be  a  connecting  link  between 


286  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  xvi 

the  two  nations — that  he  had  much  to  teach  English- 
men, and  that  they  were  worth  teaching.  He 
thoroughly  sympathised  with  the  earnestness  and 
strong  convictions  of  English  religion  ;  but  he  thought 
it  lamentably  destitute  of  rational  grounds,  of  largeness 
of  idea  and  of  critical  insight,  enslaved  to  the  letter, 
and  afraid  of  inquiry.  But,  with  all  drawbacks,  his 
visit  to  England  made  it  a  very  attractive  place  to 
him  ;  and  when  he  was  appointed  by  his  Government 
Envoy  to  the  Swiss  Confederation,  with  strict  in- 
junctions "  to  do  nothing,"  his  eyes  w^ere  often  turned 
towards  England.  In  1840  the  King  of  Prussia  died, 
and  Bunsen's  friend  and  patron,  the  Crown  Prince, 
became  Frederic  William  IV.  He  resembled  Bunsen 
in  more  ways  than  one ;  in  his  ardent  religious 
sentiment,  in  his  eagerness,  in  his  undoubting  and  not 
always  far-sighted  self-confidence  and  self-assertion, 
and  in  a  combination  of  practical  vagueness  of  view 
and  a  want  of  understanding  men,  with  a  feverish 
imperiousness  in  carrying  out  a  favourite  plan.  In 
1841  he  sent  Bunsen  to  England  to  negotiate  the 
ill-considered  and  precipitate  arrangement  for  the 
Jerusalem  bishopric  ;  and  on  the  successful  conclusion 
of  the  negotiation,  Bunsen  was  appointed  permanently 
to  be  Prussian  Minister  in  London.  The  manner  of 
appointment  was  remarkable.  The  King  sent  three 
names  to  Lord  Aberdeen  and  the  English  Court,  and 
they  selected  Bunsen's. 

Thus  Bunsen,  who  twenty-five  years  before  had  sat 
down  a  penniless  student,  almost  in  despair  at  the 


XVI  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  287 

failure  of  his  hopes  as  a  travelling  tutor,  in  Orgagna's 
loggia  at  Florence,  had  risen,  in  spite  of  real  difficulties 
and  opposition,  to  a  brilliant  position  in  active 
political  life ;  and  the  remarkable  point  is  that, 
whether  he  was  ambitious  or  not  of  this  kind  of 
advancement — and  it  would  perhaps  have  been  as 
well  on  his  part  to  have  implied  less  frequently  that 
he  was  not — he  was  all  along,  above  everything,  the 
student  and  the  theologian.  What  is  even  more 
remarkable  is  that,  plunged  into  the  whirl  of  London 
public  life  and  society,  he  continued  still  to  be,  more 
even  than  the  diplomatist,  the  student  and  theologian. 
The  Prussian  Embassy  during  the  years  that  he 
occupied  it,  from  1841  to  1854,  was  not  an  idle  place, 
and  Bunsen  was  not  a  man  to  leave  important  State 
business  to  other  hands.  The  French  Revolution, 
the  German  Revolution,  the  Frankfort  Assembly,  the 
question  of  the  revival  of  the  Empire,  the  beginnings 
of  the  Danish  quarrel  and  of  the  Crimean  war,  all  fell 
within  that  time,  and  gave  the  Prussian  Minister  in 
such  a  centre  as  London  plenty  to  think  of,  to  do, 
and  to  write  about.  Yet  all  this  time  was  a  time 
of  intense  and  unceasing  activity  in  that  field  of 
theological  controversy  in  which  Bunsen  took  such 
delight.  The  diplomatist  entrusted  with  the  gravest 
affairs  of  a  great  Power  in  the  most  critical  and  difficult 
times,  and  fully  alive  to  the  interest  and  responsibility 
of  his  charge,  also  worked  harder  than  most  Professors, 
and  was  as  positive  and  fiery  in  his  religious  theories 
and  antipathies  as  the  keenest  and  most  dogmatic  of 


288  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEX  xvi 

scholastic  disputants.  He  was  busy  about  Egyptian 
chronology,  about  cuneiform  writing,  about  com- 
parative philology ;  he  plunged  with  characteristic 
eagerness  into  English  theological  war ;  and  such 
books  as  his  Church  of  the  Future^  and  his  writings  on 
Ignatius  and  Hippolytus,  were  not  the  least  important 
of  the  works  which  marked  the  progress  of  the  struggle 
of  opinions  here.  But  they  represented  only  a  very 
small  part  of  the  unceasing  labour  that  was  going  on 
in  the  early  morning  hours  in  Carlton  House  Terrace. 
All  this  time  the  foundations  were  being  laid  and  the 
materials  gathered  for  books  of  wider  scope  and  more 
permanent  aim,  too  vast  for  him  to  accomplish  even 
in  his  later  years  of  leisure.  It  is  an  original  and 
instructive  picture  ;  for  though  we  boast  statesmen 
who  still  carry  on  the  great  traditions  of  scholarship, 
and  give  room  in  their  minds  for  the  deeper  and  more 
solemn  problems  of  religion  and  philosophy,  they  are 
not  supposed  to  be  able  to  carry  on  simultaneously 
their  public  business  and  their  classical  or  scientific 
studies,  and  at  any  rate  they  do  not  attack  the  latter 
with  the  devouring  zeal  with  which  Bunsen  taxed  the 
efforts  of  hard-driven  secretaries  and  readers  to  keep 
pace  with  his  inexhaustible  demands  for  more  and 
more  of  the  most  abstruse  materials  of  knowledge. 

The  end  of  his  London  diplomatic  career  was,  like 
the  end  of  his  Roman  one,  clouded  with  something 
like  disgrace  ;  and,  like  the  Roman  one,  is  left  here 
unexplained.  But  it  was  for  his  happiness,  probably, 
that  his  residence  in  England  came  to  a  close.     He 


XVI  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  289 

had  found  the  poetry  of  his  early  notions  about 
England,  political  and  theological  at  least,  gradually 
changing  into  prose.  He  found  less  and  less  to  like, 
in  what  at  first  most  attracted  him,  in  the  English 
Church  ;  he  and  it,  besides  knowing  one  another 
better,  were  also  changing.  He  probably  increased 
his  sympathies  for  England,  and  returned  in  a  measure 
to  his  old  kindness  for  it,  by  looking  at  it  only  from'  a 
distance.  The  labour  of  his  later  days,  as  vast  and 
indefatigable  as  that  of  his  earlier  days,  was  devoted 
to  his  great  work,  which  was,  as  it  were,  to  popularise 
the  Bible  and  revive  interest  in  it  by  a  change  in 
the  method  of  presenting  it  and  commenting  on  it. 
To  the  last  the  Bible  was  the  central  point  of  his 
philosophical  as  well  as  his  religious  thoughts,  as  it 
had  been  in  his  first  beginnings  as  a  student  at 
Gottingen  and  Rome.  After  a  life  of  many  trials, 
but  of  unusual  prosperity  and  enjoyment,  he  died  in 
the  end  of  i860.  The  account  of  his  last  days  is  a 
very  touching  one. 

We  do  not  pretend  to  think  Bunsen  the  great  and 
consummate  man  that,  naturally  enough,  he  appears 
to  his  friends.  We  doubt  whether  he  can  be  classed 
as  a  man  in  the  first  rank  at  all.  We  doubt  whether 
he  fully  understood  his  age,  and  yet  it  is  certain  that 
he  was  confident  and  positive  that  he  did  understand 
it  better  than  most  men  ;  and  an  undue  confidence  of 
this  kind  implies  considerable  defects  both  of  intellect 
and  character.  He  wanted  the  patient,  cautious, 
judicial    self-distrust    which    his    studies    eminently 

VOL.  II  U 


290  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  xvi 

demanded,  and  of  which  he  might  have  seen  some 
examples  in  England.  No  one  can  read  these  volumes 
without  seeing  the  disproportionate  power  which  first 
impressions  had  with  him  ;  he  was  always  ready  to 
say  that  something,  which  had  just  happened  or  come 
before  him,  was  the  greatest  or  the  most  complete  thing 
of  its  kind.  Wonderfully  active,  wonderfully  quick 
and  receptive,  full  of  imagination  and  of  the  power  of 
combining  and  constructing,  and  never  wearied  out  or 
dispirited,  his  mind  took  in  large  and  grand  ideas,  and 
developed  them  with  enthusiasm  and  success,  and 
with  all  the  resources  of  wide  and  varied  knowledge  ; 
but  the  affluence  and  ingenuity  of  his  thoughts  in- 
disposed him,  as  it  indisposes  many  other  able  men, 
to  the  prosaic  and  uninteresting  work  of  calling  these 
thoughts  into  question,  and  cross-examining  himself 
upon  their  grounds  and  tenableness.  He  tried  too 
much  ;  the  multiplicity  of  his  intellectual  interests 
was  too  much  for  him,  and  he  often  thought  that  he 
was  explaining  when  he  was  but  weaving  a  wordy 
tissue,  and  "darkening  counsel"  as  much  as  any  of 
the  theological  sciolists  whom  he  denounced.  People, 
for  instance,  must,  it  seems  to  us,  be  very  easily 
satisfied  who  find  any  fresh  light  in  the  attempt,  not 
unfrequent  in  his  letters,  to  adapt  the  Lutheran 
watchword  of  Justification  by  faith  to  modern  ideas. 
He  was  very  rapid,  and  this  rapidity  made  him  hasty 
and  precipitate  ;  it  also  made  him  apt  to  despise  other 
men,  and,  what  was  of  more  consequence,  the  diffi- 
culties of  the  subject  likewise.     Others  did  not  always 


XVI  LIFE  OF  BARON  BUNSEN  291 

find  it  easy  to  understand  him ;  and  it  may  fairly  be 
questioned  if  he  ahvays  sufficiently  asked  whether  he 
understood  himself  He  was  generous  and  large- 
spirited  in  intention,  though  not  always  so  in  fact. 

Doubtless  so  much  knowledge,  so  much  honest  and 
unsparing  toil,  such  freshness  and  quickness  of  thought, 
have  not  been  wasted ;  there  will  always  be  much  to 
learn  from  Bunsen's  writings.  But  his  main  service 
has  been  the  moral  one  of  his  example  ;  of  his  ardent 
and  high-souled  industry,  of  his  fearlessness  in  accepting 
the  conclusions  of  his  inquiries,  of  his  untiring  faith 
through  many  changes  and  some  disappointments  that 
there  is  a  way  to  reconcile  all  the  truths  that  interest 
men — those  of  religion,  and  those  of  nature  and 
history.  The  sincerity  and  earnestness  with  which  he 
attempted  this  are  a  lesson  to  everybody ;  his  success 
is  more  difficult  to  recognise,  and  it  may  perhaps  be 
allowable  to  wish  that  he  had  taken  more  exactly  the 
measure  of  the  great  task  which  he  set  to  himself. 
His  ambition  was  a  high  one.  He  aspired  to  be  the 
Luther  of  the  new  151 7  w^hich  he  so  often  dwelt  upon, 
and  to  construct  a  theology  which,  without  breaking 
with  the  past,  should  show  what  Christianity  really  is, 
and  command  the  faith  and  fill  the  opening  thought  of 
the  present.  It  can  hardly  be  said  that  he  succeeded. 
The  Church  of  the  Future  still  waits  its  interpreter, 
to  make  good  its  pretensions  to  throw  the  ignorant 
and  mistaken  Church  of  the  Past  into  the  shade. 


XVII 

COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE^ 

Mr.  Keble  has  been  fortunate  in  his  biographer. 
There  have  been  since  his  death  various  attempts  to 
appreciate  a  character  manifestly  of  such  depth  and 
interest,  yet  about  which  outsiders  could  find  so  Httle 
to  say.  Professor  Shairp,  of  St.  Andrews,  two  or 
three  years  ago  gave  a  charming  little  sketch,  full  of 
heart  and  insight,  and  full  too  of  noble  modesty  and 
reverence,  which  deserves  to  be  rescued  from  the 
danger  of  being  forgotten  into  which  sketches  are  apt 
to  fall,  both  on  account  of  its  direct  subject,  and  also 
for  the  contemporary  evidence  which  it  contains  of 
the  impressions  made  on  a  perfectly  impartial  and 
intelligent  observer  by  the  early  events  of  the  Oxford 
movement.  The  brilliant  Dean  of  Westminster,  in 
Macf?ii//an's  Magazine,  has  attempted,  with  his  usual 
grace  and  kindliness,  to  do  justice  to  Keble's  char- 
acter, and  has  shown  how  hard  he  found  the  task. 
The  paper  on  Keble  forms  a  pendant  to  a  recent 

1  A  Memoir  of  the  Rev.  John  Keble.      By  the  Right  Hon.  Sir 
J.  T.  Coleridge.      Saturday  Revieio,  20th  March  1869. 


xvii  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  293 

paper  on  Dean  Milman.  The  two  papers  show  con- 
spicuously the  measure  and  range  of  Dr.  Stanley's 
power;  what  he  can  comprehend  and  appreciate  in 
religious  earnestness  and  height,  and  what  he  can- 
not ;  in  what  shapes,  as  in  Dean  Milman,  he  can 
thoroughly  sympathise  with  it  and  grasp  it,  and  where 
its  phenomena,  as  in  Mr.  Keble,  simply  perplex  and 
baffle  him,  and  carry  him  out  of  his  depth. 

Sir  John  Coleridge  knew  Keble  probably  as 
long  and  as  intimately  as  any  one ;  and  on  the 
whole,  he  had  the  most  entire  sympathy  with  his 
friend's  spirit,  even  where  he  disagreed  with  his 
opinions.  He  thoroughly  understood  and  valued 
the  real  and  living  unity  of  a  character  which 
mostly  revealed  itself  to  the  outer  world  by  what 
seemed  jerks  and  discordant  traits.  From  early 
youth,  through  manhood  to  old  age,  he  had  watched 
and  tested  and  loved  that  varied  play  and  harmony 
of  soul  and  mind,  which  was  sometimes  tender,  some- 
times stern,  sometimes  playful,  sometimes  eager ; 
abounding  with  flashes  of  real  genius,  and  yet  always 
inclining  by  instinctive  preference  to  things  homely 
and  humble ;  but  which  was  always  sound  and  un- 
selfish and  thorough,  endeavouring  to  subject  itself 
to  the  truth  and  will  of  God.  To  Sir  John  Coleridge 
all  this  was  before  him  habitually  as  a  whole ;  he 
could  take  it  in,  not  by  putting  piece  by  piece  to- 
gether, but  because  he  saw  it.  And  besides  being 
an  old  and  affectionate  and  intelligent  friend,  he  was 
also  a  discriminating  one.     In  his  circumstances  he 


294  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  xvii 

was  as  opposite  to  Keble  as  any  one  could  be ;  he 
was  a  lawyer  and  man  of  the  world,  whose  busy  life 
at  Westminster  had  little  in  common  with  the  studies 
or  pursuits  of  the  divine  and  the  country  parson. 

Such  an  informant  presents  a  picture  entirely 
different  in  kind  from  the  comments  and  criticisms 
of  those  who  can  judge  only  from  Mr.  Keble's 
writings  and  religious  line,  or  from  the  rare  occasions 
in  which  he  took  a  public  part.  These  appearances, 
to  many  who  willingly  acknowledge  the  charm  which 
has  drawn  to  him  the  admiration  and  affection  of 
numbers  externally  most  widely  at  variance  with  him, 
do  not  always  agree  together.  People  delight  in  his 
poetry  who  hate  his  theology.  They  cannot  say  too 
much  of  the  tenderness,  the  depth,  the  truth,  the 
quick  and  delicate  spirit  of  love  and  purity,  which 
have  made  his  verses  the  best  interpreters  and  soothers 
of  modern  religious  feeling ;  yet,  in  the  religious 
system  from  which  his  poetry  springs,  they  find  nothing 
but  what  seems  to  them  dry,  harsh,  narrow,  and 
antiquated.  He  attracts  and  he  repels;  and  the 
attraction  and  repulsion  are  equally  strong.  They 
see  one  side,  and  he  is  irresistible  in  his  simplicity, 
humbleness,  unworldliness,  and  ever  considerate 
charity,  combined  with  so  much  keenness  and  fresh- 
ness of  thought,  and  such  sure  and  unfailing  truth  of 
feeling.  They  see  another,  and  he  seems  to  them 
full  of  strange  unreality,  strained,  exaggerated,  morbid, 
bristling  with  a  forced  yet  inflexible  intolerance.  At 
one  moment  he  seems  the  very  ideal  of  a  Christian 


XVII  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  295 

teacher,  made  to  win  the  sympathy  of  all  hearts ;  the 
next  moment  a  barrier  rises  in  the  shape  of  some 
unpopular  doctrine  or  some  display  of  zealous  sever- 
ity, seeming  to  be  a  strange  contrast  to  all  that  was 
before,  which  utterly  astonishes  and  disappoints.  Mr. 
Keble  was  very  little  known  to  the  public  in  general, 
less  so  even  than  others  whose  names  are  associated 
with  his  ;  and  it  is  evident  that  to  the  public  in 
general  he  presented  a  strange  assemblage  of  inco- 
herent and  seemingly  irreconcilable  qualities.  His 
mind  seemed  to  work  and  act  in  different  directions ; 
and  the  results  at  the  end  seemed  to  be  with  wide 
breaks  and  interruptions  between  them.  But  a  book 
like  this  enables  us  to  trace  back  these  diverging 
lines  to  the  centre  from  which  they  spring.  What 
seemed  to  be  in  such  sharp  contradiction  at  the 
outside  is  seen  to  flow  naturally  from  the  perfectly 
homogeneous  and  consistent  character  within.  Many 
people  will  of  course  except  to  the  character.  It  is  not 
the  type  likely  to  find  favour  in  an  age  of  activity,  doubt, 
and  change.  But,  as  it  was  realised  in  Mr.  Keble, 
there  it  is  in  Sir  John  Coleridge's  pages,  perfectly 
real,  perfectly  natural,  perfectly  whole  and  uniform, 
with  nothing  double  or  incongruous  in  it,  though  it 
unfolded  itself  in  various  and  opposite  ways.  And 
its  ideal  was  simply  that  which  has  been  consecrated 
as  the  saintly  character  in  the  Christian  Church  since 
the  days  of  St.  John — the  deepest  and  most  genuine 
love  of  all  that  was  good  ;  the  deepest  and  most 
genuine  hatred  of  all  that  was  believed  to  be  evil. 


296  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  xvii 

The  picture  which  Sir  John  Coleridge  puts  before 
us,  though  deficient  in  what  is  striking  and  brilliant, 
is  a  sufficiently  remarkable  and  uncommon  one.  It 
is  the  picture  of  a  man  of  high  cultivation  and  in- 
tellect, in  whom  religion  was  not  merely  something 
flavouring  and  elevating  life,  not  merely  a  great 
element  and  object  of  spiritual  activity,  but  really 
and  unaffectedly  the  one  absorbing  interest,  and 
the  spring  of  every  thought  and  purpose,  ^^^lether 
people  like  such  a  character  or  not,  and  whether  or 
not  they  may  think  the  religion  wrong,  or  distorted 
and  imperfect,  if  they  would  fairly  understand  the 
writer  of  the  Christian  Year  they  must  start  from  this 
point.  He  was  a  man  who,  without  a  particle  of  the 
religious  cant  of  any  school,  without  any  self-con- 
sciousness or  pretension  or  unnatural  strain,  literally 
passed  his  days  under  the  quick  and  pervading  influ- 
ence, for  restraint  and  for  stimulus,  of  the  will  and 
presence  of  God.  With  this  his  whole  soul  was 
possessed  ;  its  power  over  him  had  not  to  be  invoked 
and  stirred  up  ;  it  acted  spontaneously  and  unnoticed 
in  him ;  it  was  dominant  in  all  his  activity ;  it 
quenched  in  him  aims,  and  even,  it  may  be,  facul- 
ties ;  it  continually  hampered  the  free  play  of  his 
powers  and  gifts,  and  made  him  often  seem,  to  those 
who  had  not  the  key,  awkward,  unequal,  and  unin- 
telligible. But  for  this  awful  sense  of  truth  and 
reality  unseen,  which  dwarfed  to  him  all  personal 
thoughts  and  all  present  things,  he  might  have  been 
a  more  finished  writer,  a  more  attractive  preacher, 


XVII  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  297 

a  less  indifferent  foster-father  to  his  own  works.  But 
it  seemed  to  him  a  shame,  in  the  presence  of  all  that 
his  thoughts  habitually  dwelt  with,  to  think  of  the 
ordinary  objects  of  authorship,  of  studying  anything 
of  this  world  for  its  own  sake,  of  perfecting  works 
of  art,  of  cultivating  the  subtle  forces  and  spells 
of  language  to  give  attractiveness  to  his  writings. 
Abruptness,  inadequacy,  and  obscurity  of  expression 
were  light  matters,  and  gave  him  little  concern, 
compared  with  the  haunting  fear  of  unreal  words. 
This  "seeking  first  the  kingdom  of  God  and  His 
righteousness,"  as  he  understood  it,  was  the  basis  of 
all  that  he  was ;  it  was  really  and  unaffectedly  his 
governing  principle,  the  root  of  his  affections  and  his 
antipathies,  just  as  to  other  men  is  the  passion  for 
scientific  discovery  or  political  life. 

But  within  these  limits,  and  jealously  restrained 
by  these  conditions,  a  strongly  marked  character, 
exuberant  with  power  and  life,  and  the  play  of 
individual  qualities,  displayed  itself.  There  were 
two  intellectual  sides  to  his  mind — one  which 
made  him  a  poet,  quickness  and  delicacy  of 
observation  and  sympathetic  interpretation,  the  realis- 
ing and  anticipating  power  of  deep  feeling  and 
penetrative  imagination ;  the  other,  at  first  sight, 
little  related  to  poetry,  a  hard-headed,  ingenious, 
prosaic  shrewdness  and  directness  of  common  sense, 
dealing  practically  w^ith  things  as  they  are  and  on  the 
whole,  very  little  curious  about  scientific  questions 
and  precision,  argumentative  in  a  fashion  modelled 


298  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  xvii 

on  Bishop  Butler,  and  full  of  logical  resource,  good 
and,  often  it  must  be  owned,  bad.  It  was  a  mind 
which  unfolded  first  under  the  plain,  manly  discipline 
of  an  old-fashioned  English  country  parsonage,  where 
the  unshowy  piety  and  strong  morality  and  modest 
theology  of  the  middle  age  of  Anglicanism,  the  school 
of  Pearson,  Bull,  and  Wilson,  were  supreme.  And 
from  this  it  came  under  the  new  influences  of  bold 
and  independent  thought  which  were  beginning  to 
stir  at  Oxford ;  influences  which  were  at  first  repre- 
sented by  such  men  as  Davison,  Copleston,  and, 
above  all,  Whately ;  influences  which  repelled  Keble 
by  what  he  saw  of  hardness,  shallowness,  and  arro- 
gance, and  still  more  of  self-sufficiency  and  intel- 
lectual display  and  conceit  in  the  prevailing  tone  of 
speculation,  but  which  nevertheless  powerfully  affected 
him,  and  of  which  he  showed  the  traces  to  the  last. 
Sir  John  Coleridge  is  disappointing  as  to  the  amount 
of  light  which  he  throws  on  the  process  which  was 
going  on  in  Keble's  mind  during  the  fifteen  years  or 
so  between  his  degree  and  the  Christiaji  Year ;  but 
there  is  one  touch  which  refers  to  this  period. 
Speaking  in  1838  of  Alexander  Knox,  and  expressing 
dislike  of  his  position,  "  as  on  the  top  of  a  high  hill, 
seeing  which  way  different  schools  tend,"  and  "exer- 
cising a  royal  right  of  eclecticism  over  all,"  he  adds  : — 

I  speak  the  more  feelingly  because  I  know  I  was 
myself  inclined  to  eclecticism  at  one  time  ;  and  if  it  had 
not  been  for  my  father  and  my  brother,  where  I  should 
have  been  now,  who  can  say  ? 


XVII  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  299 

But  he  was  a  man  who,  with  a  very  vigorous  and 
keen  intellect,  capable  of  making  him  a  formidable 
disputant  if  he  had  been  so  minded,  may  be  said  not 
to  have  cared  for  his  intellect.  He  used  it  at  need, 
but  he  distrusted  and  undervalued  it  as  an  instru- 
ment and  help.  Goodness  was  to  him  the  one  object 
of  desire  and  reverence  ;  it  was  really  his  own  measure 
of  what  he  respected  and  valued;  and  where  he  recog- 
nised it,  and  in  whatever  shape,  grave  or  gay,  he  cared 
not  about  seeming  consistent  in  somehow  or  other 
paying  it  homage.  People  who  knew  him  remember 
how,  in  this  austere  judge  of  heresy,  burdened 
by  the  ever-pressing  conviction  of  the  "  decay  "  of 
the  Church  and  the  distress  of  a  time  of  change, 
tenderness,  playfulness,  considerateness,  the  restraint 
of  a  modesty  which  could  not  but  judge,  yet  mis- 
trusted its  fitness,  marked  his  ordinary  intercourse. 
Overflowing  with  affection  to  his  friends,  and  showing 
it  in  all  kinds  of  unconventional  and  unexpected 
instances,  keeping  to  the  last  a  kind  of  youthful 
freshness  as  if  he  had  never  yet  realised  that  he  was 
not  a  boy,  and  shrunk  from  the  formality  and  don- 
nishness of  grown-up  life,  he  was  the  most  refined 
and  thoughtful  of  gentlemen,  and  in  the  midst  of  the 
fierce  party  battles  of  his  day,  with  all  his  strong 
feeling  of  the  tremendous  significance  of  the  strife, 
always  a  courteous  and  considerate  opponent.  Strong 
words  he  used,  and  used  deliberately.  But  those 
were  the  days  when  the  weapons  of  sarcasm  and 
personal  attack  were  freely  handled.     The  leaders  of 


300  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  xvir 

the  High  Church  movement  were  held  up  to  detesta- 
tion as  the  Oxford  Malignants,  and  they  certainly 
showed  themselves  fully  able  to  give  their  assailants 
as  good  as  they  brought ;  yet  Mr.  Keble,  involved  in 
more  than  one  trying  personal  controversy,  feeling  as 
sternly  and  keenly  as  any  one  about  public  questions, 
and  tried  by  disappointment  and  the  break  up  of  the 
strongest  ties,  never  lost  his  evenness  of  temper, 
never  appeared  in  the  arena  of  personal  recrimina- 
tion. In  all  the  prominent  part  which  he  took,  and 
in  the  resolute  and  sometimes  wrathful  tone  in  which 
he  defended  what  seemed  harsh  measures,  he  may 
have  dropped  words  which  to  opponents  seemed 
severe  ones,  but  never  any  which  even  they  could 
call  a  scornful  one  or  a  sneer. 

It  was  in  keeping  with  all  that  he  was — a  mark  of 
imperfection  it  may  be,  yet  part  of  the  nobleness  and 
love  ot  reality  in  a  man  who  felt  so  deeply  the  weak- 
ness and  ignorance  of  man — that  he  cared  so  little 
about  the  appearances  of  consistency.  Thus,  bound 
as  he  was  by  principle  to  show  condemnation  when 
he  thought  that  a  sacred  cause  was  invaded,  he  was 
always  inclining  to  conciliate  his  wrath  with  his 
affectionateness,  and  his  severity  with  his  considera- 
tion of  circumstances  and  his  own  mistrust  of  himself. 
He  was,  of  all  men  holding  strong  opinions,  one  of 
the  most  curiously  and  unexpectedly  tolerant,  wher- 
ever he  could  contrive  to  invent  an  excuse  for  toler 
ance,  or  where  long  habitual  confidence  was  weighed 
against  disturbing  appearances.     Sir  John  Coleridge 


XVII  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  301 

touches  this  in  the  following  extract,  which  is  charac- 
teristic : — 

On  questions  of  this  kind  especially  [University 
Reform],  his  principles  were  uncompromising ;  if  a 
measure  offended  against  what  he  thought  honest,  or 
violated  what  he  thought  sacred,  good  motives  in  the 
framers  he  would  not  admit  as  palliation,  nor  would  he 
be  comforted  by  an  opinion  of  mine  that  measures 
mischievous  in  their  logical  consequences  were  never  in 
the  result  so  mischievous,  or  beneficial  measures  so 
beneficial,  as  had  been  foretold.  So  he  writes  playfully 
to  me  at  an  earlier  time  : — 

"  Hurrell  Froude  and  I  took  into  consideration  your 
opinion  that  'there  are  good  men  of  all  parties,'  and 
agreed  that  it  is  a  bad  doctrine  for  these  days  ;  the  time 
being  come  in  which,  according  to  John  Miller,  'scoundrels 
must  be  called  scoundrels ' ;  and,  moreover,  we  have 
stigmatised  the  said  opinion  by  the  name  of  the  Cole- 
ridge Heresy.      So  hold  it  any  longer  at  your  peril." 

I  think  it  fair  to  set  down  these  which  were,  in  truth, 
formed  opinions,  and  not  random  sayings ;  but  it  would  be 
most  unfair  if  one  concluded  from  them,  written  and 
spoken  in  the  freedom  of  friendly  intercourse,  that  there 
was  anything  sour  in  his  spirit,  or  harsh  and  narrow  in 
his  practice  ;  when  you  discussed  any  of  these  things 
with  him,  the  discussion  was  pretty  sure  to  end,  not 
indeed  with  any  insincere  concession  of  what  he  thought 
right  and  true,  but  in  consideration  for  individuals  and 
depreciation  of  himself. 

And  the  same  thing  comes  out  in  the  interesting 


302  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  xvii 

letter  in   which   the   Solicitor-General  describes  his 
last  recollections  of  Keble  : — 

There  was,  I  am  sure,  no  trace  of  failing  then  to  be 
discerned  in  his  apprehension,  or  judgment,  or  discourse. 
He  was  an  old  man  who  had  been  very  ill,  who  was  still 
physically  weak,  and  who  needed  care  ;  but  he  was  the 
same  Mr.  Keble  I  had  always  known,  and  whom,  for 
aught  that  appeared,  I  might  hope  still  to  know  for 
many  years  to  come.  Little  bits  of  his  tenderness, 
flashes  of  his  fun,  glimpses  of  his  austerer  side,  I  seem 
to  recall,  but  I  cannot  put  them  upon  paper.  .  .  .  Once 
I  remember  walking  with  him  just  the  same  short  walk, 
from  his  house  to  Sir  William's,  and  our  conversation 
fell  upon  Charles  I.,  with  regard  to  whose  truth  and 
honour  I  had  used  some  expressions  in  a  review,  which 
had,  as  I  heard,  displeased  him.  I  referred  to  this,  and 
he  said  it  was  true.  I  replied  that  I  was  very  sorry  to 
displease  him  by  anything  I  said  or  thought ;  but  that 
if  the  Naseby  letters  were  genuine,  I  could  not  think 
that  what  I  said  was  at  all  too  strong,  and  that  a  man 
could  but  do  his  best  to  form  an  honest  opinion  upon 
historical  evidence,  and,  if  he  had  to  speak,  to  express 
that  opinion.  On  this  he  said,  with  a  tenderness  and 
humility  not  only  most  touching,  but  to  me  most  em- 
barrassing, that  "  It  might  be  so  ;  what  was  he  to  judge 
of  other  men  ;  he  was  old,  and  things  were  now  looked 
at  very  differently  ;  that  he  knew  he  had  many  things  to 
unlearn  and  learn  afresh ;  and  that  I  must  not  mind 
what  he  had  said,  for  that  in  truth  belief  in  the  heroes 
of  his  youth  had  become  part  of  him."  I  am  afraid 
these  arc  my  words,  and  not  his  ;  and  I  cannot  give  his 


XVII  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  303 

way  of  speaking,  which  to  any  one  with  a  heart,  I  think, 
would  have  been  as  overcoming  as  it  was  to  me. 

This  same  carelessness  about  appearances  seems  to 
us  to  be  shown  in  Keble's  theological  position  in  his 
later  years.  A  more  logical,  or  a  more  plausible,  but 
a  less  thoroughly  real  man  might  easily  have  drifted 
into  Romanism.  There  was  much  in  the  circum- 
stances round  him,  in  the  admissions  which  he  had 
made,  to  lead  that  way ;  and  his  chivalrous  readiness 
to  take  the  beaten  or  unpopular  side  would  help  the 
tendency.  But  he  was  a  man  who  gave  great  weight 
to  his  instinctive  perception  of  what  was  right  and 
wrong;  and  he  was  also  a  man  who,  when  he  felt 
sure  of  his  duty,  did  not  care  a  straw  about  what  the 
world  thought  of  appearances,  or  required  as  a  satis- 
faction of  seeming  consistency.  In  him  was  eminently 
illustrated  the  characteristic  strength  and  weakness  of 
Enghsh  religion,  which  naturally  comes  out  in  that 
form  of  it  which  is  called  Anglicanism ;  that  poor 
Anglicanism,  the  butt  and  laughing-stock  of  all  the 
clever  and  high-flying  converts  to  Rome,  of  all  the 
clever  and  high-flying  Liberals,  and  of  all  those  poor 
copyists  of  the  first,  far  from  clever,  though  very 
high-flying,  who  now  give  themselves  out  as  exclusive 
heirs  of  the  great  name  of  CathoHc ;  sneered  at  on 
all  sides  as  narrow,  meagre,  shattered,  barren ;  which 
certainly  does  not  always  go  to  the  bottom  of  questions, 
and  is  too  much  given  to  "  hunting-up  "  passages  for 
catenas  of  precedents  and  authorities ;  but  which  yet 
has  a  strange,  obstinate,  tenacious  moral  force  in  it ; 


304  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  xvii 

which,  without  being  successful  in  formulating  theories 
or  in  solving  fallacies,  can  pierce  through  pretences 
and  shams ;  and  which  in  England  seems  the  only 
shape  in  which  intense  religious  faith  can  unfold 
itself  and  connect  itself  with  morality  and  duty, 
without  seeming  to  wear  a  peculiar  dress  of  its 
own,  and  putting  a  barrier  of  self-chosen  watch- 
words and  singularities  between  itself  and  the  rest  of 
the  nation. 

It  seems  to  us  a  great  advantage  to  truth  to  have 
a  character  thus  exhibited  in  its  unstudied  and  living 
completeness,  and  exhibited  directly,  as  the  impres- 
sion from  life  was  produced  on  those  before  whose 
eyes  it  drew  itself  out  day  by  day  in  word  and  act,  as 
the  occasion  presented  itself.  There  is,  no  doubt,  a 
more  vivid  and  effective  way ;  one  in  which  the  Dean 
of  AV^estminster  is  a  great  master,  though  it  is  not 
the  method  which  he  followed  in  what  is  probably 
his  most  perfect  work,  the  Life  of  Dr.  Arnold — the 
method  of  singling  out  points,  and  placing  them,  if 
possible,  under  a  concentrated  light,  and  in  strong 
contrast  and  relief.  Thus  in  Keble's  case  it  is  easy, 
and  doubtless  to  many  observers  natural  and  tempt- 
ing, to  put  side  by  side,  with  a  strange  mixture  of 
perplexity  and  repulsion,  The  Christian  Year,  and  the 
treatise  On  Eucharistical  Adoratio7i ;  to  compare  even 
in  Keble's  poetry,  his  tone  on  nature  and  human  life, 
on  the  ways  of  children  and  the  thoughts  of  death, 
with  that  on  religious  error  and  ecclesiastical  diverg- 
ences from  the  Anglican  type ;  and  to  dwell  on  the 


XVII  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  305 

contrast  between  Keble  bearing  his  great  gifts  with 
such  sweetness  and  modesty,  and  touching  with  such 
tenderness  and  depth  the  most  delicate  and  the 
purest  of  human  feelings,  and  Keble  as  the  editor 
of  Froude's  Remains^  forward  against  Dr.  Hampden, 
breaking  off  a  friendship  of  years  with  Dr.  Arnold, 
stiff  against  liberal  change  and  indulgent  to  ancient 
folly  and  error,  the  eulogist  of  patristic  mysticism  and 
Bishop  Wilson's  "discipline,"  and  busy  in  the  ecclesi- 
astical agitations  and  legal  wranglings  of  our  later 
days,  about  Jerusalem  Bishoprics  and  Courts  of  Final 
Appeal  and  ritual  details,  about  Gorham  judgments, 
Essays  and  Reviews  prosecutions,  and  Colenso 
scandals.  The  objection  to  this  method  of  contrast 
is  that  it  does  not  give  the  whole  truth.  It  does  not 
take  notice  that,  in  appreciating  a  man  like  Keble, 
the  thing  to  start  from  is  that  his  ideal  and  model 
and  rule  of  character  was  neither  more  nor  less  than 
the  old  Christian  one.  It  was  simply  what  was 
accepted  as  right  and  obvious  and  indisputable,  not 
by  Churchmen  only,  but  by  all  earnest  believers  up 
to  our  own  days.  Given  certain  conditions  of  Chris- 
tian faith  and  duty  which  he  took  for  granted  as 
much  as  the  ordinary  laws  of  morality,  then  the 
man's  own  individual  gifts  or  temper  or  leanings 
displayed  themselves.  But  when  people  talk  of 
Keble  being  narrow  and  rigid  and  harsh  and  intoler- 
ant, they  ought  first  to  recollect  that  he  had  been 
brought  up  with  the  ideas  common  to  all  whom  he 
ever   heard    of   or   knew   as    religious    people.     All 

VOL.  II  X 


306  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  xvii 

earnest  religious  conviction  must  seem  narrow  to 
those  who  do  not  share  it.  It  was  nothing  individual 
or  peculiar,  either  to  him  or  his  friends,  to  have 
strong  notions  about  defending  what  they  believed 
that  they  had  received  as  the  truth ;  and  they  were 
people  who  knew  what  they  were  about,  too,  and  did 
not  take  things  up  at  random.  In  this  he  was  not 
different  from  Hooker,  or  Jeremy  Taylor,  or  Bishop 
Butler,  or  Baxter,  or  Wesley,  or  Dr.  Chalmers;  it 
may  be  added,  that  he  was  not  different  from  Dr. 
Arnold  or  Archbishop  Whately.  It  must  not  be 
forgotten  that  till  of  late  years  there  was  always 
supposed,  rightly  or  wrongly,  to  be  such  a  thing  as 
false  doctrine,  and  that  intolerance  of  it,  within  the 
limits  of  common  justice,  was  always  held  as  much 
part  of  the  Christian  character  as  devotion  and 
charity.  Men  differed  widely  as  to  what  was  false 
doctrine,  but  they  did  not  differ  much  as  to  there 
being  such  a  thing,  and  as  to  what  was  to  be  thought 
of  it.  Keble,  like  other  people  of  his  time,  took  up 
his  system,  and  really,  considering  that  the  ideal 
which  he  honestly  and  earnestly  aimed  at  was  the 
complete  system  of  the  Catholic  Church,  it  is  an 
abuse  of  words  to  call  it,  whatever  else  it  may  be 
called,  a  narrow  system.  There  may  be  a  wider 
system  still,  in  the  future ;  but  it  is  at  least  premature 
to  say  that  a  man  is  narrow  because  he  accepts  in 
good  faith  the  great  traditional  ideas  and  doctrines 
of  the  Christian  Church  ;  for  of  everything  that  can 
yet    be    called    a    religious    system,  in    the    sense 


XVII  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  307 

commonly  understood,  as  an  embodiment  of  definite 
historical  revelation,  it  is  not  easy  to  conceive  a  less 
narrow  one.  And,  accepting  it  as  the  truth,  it  was 
dearer  to  him  than  life.  That  he  was  sensitively 
alive  to  whatever  threatened  or  opposed  it,  and  was 
ready  to  start  up  like  a  soldier,  ready  to  do  battle 
against  any  odds  and  to  risk  any  unpopularity  or 
misconstruction,  was  only  the  sure  and  natural  result 
of  that  deep  love  and  loyalty  and  thorough  soundness 
of  heart  with  which  he  loved  his  friends,  but  what  he 
believed  to  be  truth  and  God's  will  better  than  his 
friends.  But  it  is  idle  and  shallow  to  confuse  the 
real  narrowness  which  springs  from  a  harsh  temper 
or  a  cramped  and  self-sufficient  intellect,  and  which  is 
quite  compatible  with  the  widest  theoretical  latitude, 
and  the  inevitable  appearance  of  narrowness  and 
severity  which  must  always  be  one  side  which  a  man 
of  strong  convictions  and  earnest  purpose  turns  to 
those  whose  strong  convictions  and  earnest  purpose 
are  opposite  to  his. 

Mr.  Keble,  saintly  as  was  his  character,  if  ever 
there  was  such  a  character,  belonged,  as  we  all  do, 
to  his  day  and  generation.  The  aspect  of  things  and 
the  thoughts  of  men  change ;  enlarging,  we  are 
always  apt  to  think,  but  perhaps  really  also  contract- 
ing in  some  directions  where  they  once  were  larger. 
In  Mr.  Keble,  the  service  which  he  rendered  to  his 
time  consisted,  not  merely,  as  it  is  sometimes  thought, 
in  soothing  and  refining  it,  but  in  bracing  it.  He 
was  the  preacher  and  example  of  manly  hardness, 


308  COLERIDGE'S  MEMOIR  OF  KEBLE  xvii 

simplicity,  purpose  in  the  religious  character.  It  may 
be  that  his  hatred  of  evil — of  hollowness,  impurity, 
self-will,  conceit,  ostentation — was  greater  than  was 
always  his  perception  of  various  and  mingled  good, 
or  his  comprehension  of  those  middle  things  and 
states  which  are  so  much  before  us  now.  But  the 
service  cannot  be  overrated,  to  all  parties,  of  the 
protest  which  his  life  and  all  his  words  were  against 
dangers  which  were  threatening  all  parties,  and  not 
least  the  Liberal  party — the  danger  of  shallowness 
and  superficial  flippancy ;  the  danger  of  showy  senti- 
ment and  insincerity,  of  worldly  indifference  to  high 
duties  and  calls.  With  the  one  great  exception  of 
Arnold — Keble's  once  sympathetic  friend,  though 
afterwards  parted  from  him — the  religious  Liberals 
of  our  time  have  little  reason  to  look  back  with  satis- 
faction to  the  leaders,  able  and  vigorous  as  some  of 
them  were,  who  represented  their  cause  then.  They 
owe  to  Keble,  as  much  as  do  those  who  are  more 
identified  with  his  theology,  the  inestimable  service 
of  having  interpreted  religion  by  a  genuine  life, 
corresponding  in  its  thoroughness  and  unsparing, 
unpretending  devotedness,  as  well  as  in  its  subtle 
vividness  of  feeling,  to  the  great  object  which  religion 
professes  to  contemplate. 


XVIII 

MAURICE'S  THEOLOGICAL  ESSAYS  i 

The  purpose  of  this  volume  of  essays  is  to  consider 
the  views  entertained  by  Unitarians  of  what  are 
looked  upon  by  Christians  generally  as  fundamental 
truths ;  to  examine  what  force  there  is  in  Unitarian 
objections,  and  what  mistakes  are  involved  in  the 
popular  notions  and  representations  of  those  funda- 
mental truths;  and  so,  without  entering  into  con- 
troversy, for  which  Mr.  Maurice  declares  himself 
entirely  indisposed,  and  in  the  utility  of  which  he 
entirely  disbelieves,  to  open  the  way  for  a  deeper 
and  truer,  and  more  serious  review,  by  all  parties,  of 
either  the  differences  or  the  misunderstandings  which 
keep  them  asunder.  It  is  a  work,  the  writer  con- 
siders, as  important  as  any  which  he  has  undertaken : 
"  No  labour  I  have  been  engaged  in  has  occupied  me 
so  much,  or  interested  me  more  deeply;"  and  with  his 
estimate  of  his  subject  we  are  not  disposed  to  disagree. 
We  always  rise  from  the  perusal  of  one  of  Mr. 

^    Theological  Essays.     By  F.  D.  Maurice.     Guardian,  7th  Sep 
tember  1853. 


310  MAURICE'S  THEOLOGICAL  ESSAYS         xviii 

Maurice's  books  with  the  feeling  that  he  has  shown 
us  one  great  excellence,  and  taught  us  one  great 
lesson.  He  has  shown  us  an  example  of  serious  love 
of  truth,  and  an  earnest  sense  of  its  importance,  and 
of  his  own  responsibility  in  speaking  of  it.  Most 
readers,  whatever  else  they  may  think,  must  have 
their  feeling  of  the  wide  and  living  interest  of  a 
theological  or  moral  subject  quickened  by  Mr. 
Maurice's  thoughts  on  it.  This  is  the  excellence. 
The  lesson  is  this — to  look  into  the  meaning  of  our 
familiar  words,  and  to  try  to  use  them  with  a  real 
meaning.  Not  that  Mr.  Maurice  always  shows  us 
how ;  but  it  is  difficult  for  conscience  to  escape  being 
continually  reminded  of  the  duty.  And  it  is  in  these 
two  things  that  the  value  of  Mr.  Maurice's  wTitings 
mainly  consists.  The  enforcing  of  them  has  been,  to 
our  mind,  his  chief  "mission,"  and  his  most  valuable 
contribution  to  the  needs  of  his  generation. 

In  this  volume  they  are  exhibited,  as  in  his  former 
ones ;  and  in  this  he  shows  also,  as  he  has  shown 
before,  his  earnest  desire  to  find  a  way  whereby, 
without  compromising  truth  or  surrendering  sacred 
convictions  of  the  heart,  serious  men  of  very  different 
sides  might  be  glad  to  find  themselves  in  some  points 
mistaken,  in  order  that  they  might  find  themselves  at 
one.  This  philosophy,  not  of  comprehension  but  of 
conciliation,  the  craving  after  which  has  awakened 
in  the  Church,  whenever  mental  energy  has  been 
quickened,  the  philosophy  in  which  Clement  of 
Alexandria  and  Origcn,  and,  we  may  add,  St.  Augus- 


XVIII         MAURICE'S  THEOLOGICAL  ESSAYS  311 

tine,  made  many  earnest  essays,  is  certainly  no 
unworthy  aim  for  the  theologian  of  our  days.  He 
would,  indeed,  deserve  largely  of  the  Church  who 
should  show  us  a  solid  and  safe  way  to  it. 

But  while  we  are  far  from  denouncing  or  suspect- 
ing the  wish  or  the  design,  we  are  bound  to  watch 
jealously  and  criticise  narrowly  the  execution.  For 
we  all  know  what  such  plans  have  come  to  before 
now.  And  it  is  for  the  interest  of  all  serious  and 
earnest  people  on  all  sides,  that  there  should  be  no 
needless  and  additional  confusion  introduced  into 
theology — such  confusion  as  is  but  too  likely  to 
follow,  when  a  design  of  conciliation,  with  the  aim  of 
which  so  many,  for  good  reasons  or  bad  ones,  are 
sure  to  sympathise,  is  carried  out  by  hands  that  are 
not  equal  to  it.  With  the  fullest  sense  of  the  serious 
truthfulness  of  those  who  differ  from  us,  of  the  real 
force  of  many  of  their  objections  and  criticisms  on 
our  proceedings,  our  friends,  and  our  ideas,  it  is  far 
better  to  hold  our  peace,  than  from  impatience  at 
what  we  feel  to  be  the  vulnerable  point  of  our  own 
side,  to  rush  into  explanations  before  we  are  sure  of 
our  power  adequately  to  explain. 

And  to  this  charge  it  seems  to  us  that  Mr. 
Maurice  is  open.  There  is  sense  and  manliness  in 
his  disclaimer  of  proselytism  ;  and  there  is  a  meaning 
in  which  we  can  agree  with  his  account  of  truth. 
"If  I  could  persuade  all  Dissenters,"  he  says,  "to 
become  members  of  my  Church  to-morrow,  I  should 
be  very  sorry  to  do   it.     I  believe  the  chances  are 


312  MAURICE'S  THEOLOGICAL  ESSAYS         xviii 

they  might  leave  it  the  next  day.  I  do  not  wish  to 
make  them  think  as  I  think.  But  I  want  that  they 
and  I  should  be  what  we  pretend  to  be,  and  then  I 
doubt  not  we  should  find  that  there  is  a  common 
ground  for  us  all  far  beneath  our  thinkings.  For 
truth  I  hold  not  to  be  that  which  every  man 
troweth,  but  to  be  that  which  lies  at  the  bottom  of  all 
men's  trowings,  that  in  which  those  trowings  have 
their  only  meeting-point."  He  would  make  as  clear 
as  can  be  that  deep  substructure,  and  leave  the  sight 
of  it  to  work  its  natural  effect  on  the  honest  heart. 
A  noble  aim ;  but  surely  requiring,  if  anything  can, 
the  clear  eye,  the  steady  hand,  the  heart  as  calm  as 
earnest.  Surely  a  work  in  which  the  greatest  exact- 
ness and  precision,  as  well  as  largeness  of  thought, 
would  not  be  too  much.  For  if  we  but  take  away 
the  "  trowings  "  without  coming  down  to  the  central 
foundation,  or  lose  ourselves,  and  mistake  a  new 
"  trowing  "  of  our  own  for  it,  it  is  hardly  a  sufficient 
degree  of  blame  to  say  that  we  have  done  no  good. 

And  in  these  qualities  of  exactness  and  precision 
it  does  seem  to  us  that  Mr.  Maurice  is,  for  his  pur- 
pose, fatally  deficient.  His  criticisms  are  often  acute, 
his  thrusts  on  each  side  often  very  home  ones,  and 
but  too  full  of  truth  ;  his  suggestions  often  full  of 
thought  and  instruction  ;  his  balancings  and  contrasts 
of  errors  and  truths,  if  sometimes  too  artificial,  yet 
generally  striking.  But  when  we  come  to  seek  for 
the  reconciling  truth,  which  one  side  has  overlaid 
and  distorted,  and  the  other  ignorantly  shrunk  back 


XVIII         MAURICE'S  THEOLOGICAL  ESSAYS  313 

from,  but  which,  when  placed  in  its  real  light  and 
fairly  seen,  is  to  attract  the  love  and  homage  of  both, 
we  seem — not  to  grasp  a  shadow — Mr.  Maurice  is 
too  earnest  and  real  a  believer  for  that — but  to  be 
very  much  where  we  were,  except  that  a  cloud  of 
words  surrounds  us.  His  positive  statements  seem 
like  a  running  protest  against  being  obliged  to  com- 
mit himself  and  come  to  the  point ;  like  a  continual 
assertion  of  the  hopelessness  and  uselessness  of  a 
definite  form  of  speaking  about  the  matter  in  hand. 
Take,  for  instance,  the  following  short  statement : — 

"  My  object,"  he  says,  speaking  of  the  words  which 
he  has  taken  as  the  subject  of  his  essays,  "  has  been  to 
examine  the  language  with  which  we  are  most  familiar, 
and  which  has  been  open  to  most  objections,  especially 
from  Unitarians.  Respecting  the  Conception  I  have  been 
purposely  silent ;  not  because  I  have  any  doubt  about 
that  article,  or  am  indifferent  to  it,  but  because  I  believe 
the  word  '  miraculous ^^  which  we  ordinarily  connect  with 
it,  suggests  an  U7itrue  Cleaning j  because  I  think  the 
truth  is  conveyed  to  us  inost  safely  in  the  simple  la?t- 
guage  of  the  Evangelists ;  and  because  that  language 
taken  in  connection  with  the  rest  of  their  story,  offers 
itself,  I  suspect,  to  a  majority  of  those  who  have  taken 
in  the  idea  of  an  Incarnation,  as  the  o?ily  natural  a?td 
rational  account  of  the  method  by  which  the  eternal  Son 
of  God  could  have  taken  human  flesh." 

Now,  would  not  Mr.  Maurice  have  done  better 
if  he  had  enounced  the  definite  meaning,  or  shade  of 
meaning,   which  he  considers  short  of,  or  different 


314  MAURICE'S  THEOLOGICAL  ESSAYS         xviii 

from,  our  ordi?iary  meaning  of  miraculous^  as  applied 
to  this  subject,  and  yet  the  same  as  that  suggested 
by  the  Gospel  account  ?  We  have  no  doubt  what 
Mr.  Maurice  does  believe  on  this  sacred  subject. 
But  we  are  puzzled  by  what  he  means  to  disavow, 
as  an  '•^ imtrue  meanifig''''  of  the  word  7?iiraculous^  as 
applied  to  what  he  believes.  And  the  Unitarians 
whom  he  addresses  must,  we  think,  be  puzzled  too. 

We  have  quoted  this  passage  because  it  is  a  short 
one,  and  therefore  a  convenient  one  for  a  short 
notice  like  this.  But  the  same  tormenting  indistinct- 
ness pervades  the  attempts  generally  to  get  a  mean- 
ing or  a  position,  which  shall  be  substantially  and  in 
its  living  force  the  same  as  the  popular  and  orthodox 
article,  yet  convict  it  of  confusion  or  formalism ; 
and  which  shall  give  to  the  Unitarian  what  he  aims 
at  by  his  negation  of  the  popular  article,  without 
leaving  him  any  longer  a  reason  for  denying  it.  The 
essay  on  Inspiration  is  an  instance  of  this.  Mr. 
Maurice  says  very  truly,  that  it  is  necessary  to  face 
the  fact  that  important  questions  are  asked  on  the 
subject,  very  widely,  and  by  serious  people;  that 
popular  notions  are  loose  and  vague  about  it ;  that  it 
is  a  dangerous  thing  to  take  refuge  in  a  hard  theory, 
if  it  is  an  inconsistent  and  inadequate  one ;  that  if 
doubts  do  grow  up,  they  are  hardly  to  be  driven 
away  by  assertions.  He  accepts  the  challenge  to 
state  his  own  view  of  Inspiration,  and  devotes  many 
pages  to  doing  so.  In  these  pages  are  many  true 
and  striking  things.     So  far  as  we  understand,  there 


XVIII         MAURICE'S  THEOLOGICAL  ESSAYS  315 

is  not  a  statement  that  we  should  contradict.  But 
we  have  searched  in  vain  for  a  passage  which  might 
give,  in  Mr.  Maurice's  words,  a  distinct  answer  to 
the  question  of  friend  or  opponent.  What  do  you 
mean  by  the  "Inspiration  of  the  Bible?"  Mr. 
Maurice  tells  us  a  most  important  truth — that  that 
same  Great  Person  by  whose  "  holy  inspiration  "  all 
true  Christians  still  hope  to  be  taught,  inspired  the 
prophets.  He  protests  against  making  it  necessary 
to  say  that  there  is  a  generic  difference  between  one 
kind  of  Inspiration  and  the  other,  or  "  setting  up  the 
Bible  as  a  book  which  encloses  all  that  may  be  law- 
fully called  Inspiration."  He  looks  on  the  Bible  as 
a  link — a  great  one,  yet  a  link,  joining  on  to  what  is 
before  and  what  comes  after — in  God's  method  of 
teaching  man  His  truth.  He  cares  little  about 
phrases  like  "verbal  inspiration"  and  "plenary  in- 
spiration " — "  forms  of  speech  which  are  pretty  toys 
for  those  that  have  leisure  to  play  with  them ;  and  if 
they  are  not  made  so  hard  as  to  do  mischief,  the  use 
of  them  should  not  be  checked.  But  they  do  not 
belong  to  business."  He  bids  us,  instead,  give  men 
"the  Book  of  Life,"  and  "have  courage  to  tell  them 
that  there  is  a  Spirit  with  them  who  will  guide  them 
into  all  truth."  Great  and  salutary  lessons.  But  we 
must  say  that  they  have  been  long  in  the  world,  and, 
it  must  be  said,  are  as  liable  to  be  misunderstood  as 
any  other  "popular"  notions  on  the  subject.  If  there 
is  nothing  more  to  say  on  the  subject — if  it  is  one 
where,  though  we  see  and  are  sure  of  a  truth,  yet  we 


316  MAURICE'S  THEOLOGICAL  ESSAYS         xviii 

must  confess  it  to  be  behind  a  veil,  as  yet  indistinct 
and  not  to  be  grasped,  let  us  manfully  say  so,  and 
wait  till  God  reveal  even  this  unto  us.  But  it  is 
not  a  wise  or  a  right  course  to  raise  expectations  of 
being  able  to  say  something,  not  perhaps  new,  but 
satisfactory,  when  the  questions  which  are  really 
being  asked,  which  are  the  professed  occasion  of  the 
answer,  remain,  in  their  intellectual  difficulty,  entirely 
unresolved.  Mr.  Maurice  is  no  trifler;  when  he 
throws  hard  words  about, — when  at  the  close  of  this 
essay  he  paints  to  himself  the  disappointment  of  some 
"  Unitarian  listener,  who  had  hoped  that  Mr.  Maurice 
was  going  to  join  him  in  cursing  his  enemies,  and 
found  that  he  had  blessed  them  these  three  times," 
— he  ought  to  consider  whether  the  result  has  not 
been,  and  very  naturally,  to  leave  both  parties  more 
convinced  than  before  of  the  hollowness  of  all  pro- 
fessions to  enter  into,  and  give  weight  to,  the  diffi- 
culties and  the  claims  of  opposite  sides. 

Mr.  Maurice  has  not  done  justice,  as  it  seems  to 
us,  in  this  case,  to  the  difficulty  of  the  Unitarian.  In 
other  cases  he  makes  free  with  the  common  belief  of 
Christendom,  and  claims  sacrifices  which  are  as  need- 
less as  they  are  unwarrantable.  If  there  is  a  belief 
rooted  in  the  minds  of  Christians,  it  is  that  of  a  future 
judgment.  If  there  is  an  expectation  which  Scripture 
and  the  Creed  sanction  in  the  plainest  words,  it  is 
that  this  present  world  is  to  have  an  end,  and  that 
then,  a  time  now  future,  Christ  will  judge  quick  and 
dead.     Say  as  much  as  can  be  said  of  the  difficulty 


XVIII         MAURICE'S  THEOLOGICAL  ESSAYS  317 

of  conceiving  such  a  thing,  it  really  amounts  to  no 
more  than  the  difficulty  of  conceiving  what  will 
happen,  and  how  we  shall  be  dealt  with,  when  this 
familiar  world  passes  away.  And  this  belief  in  a 
''''fifial  judgment,  unlike  any  other  that  has  ever  been  in 
the  world^^^  Mr.  Maurice  would  have  us  regard  as  a 
misinterpretation  of  Bible  and  Creed — a  "  dream  " 
which  St.  Paul  would  never  "allow  us"  to  entertain,  but 
would  "compel"  us  instead  "to  look  upon  everyone 
of  what  we  rightly  call '  God's  judgments  '  as  essentially 
resembling  it  in  kind  and  principle. "  "  Our  eagerness  to 
deny  this,"  he  continues,  "to  make  out  an  altogether 
peculiar  and  unprecedented  judgment  at  the  end  of 
the  world,  has  obliged  us  first  to  practise  the  most 
violent  outrages  upon  the  language  of  Scriptiere^  insist- 
ing that  words  cannot  really  mean  what,  according  to 
all  ordinary  rules  of  construction,  they  must  mean." 
It  really  must  be  said  that  the  "  outrage,"  if  so  it  is 
to  be  called,  is  not  on  the  side  of  the  popular  beUef. 
And  why  does  this  belief  seem  untenable  to  Mr. 
Maurice  ?  Because  it  seems  inconsistent  to  him  with 
a  truth  which  he  states  and  enforces  with  no  less 
earnestness  than  reason,  that  Christ  is  every  moment 
judging  us — that  His  tribunal  is  one  before  which 
we  in  our  inmost  "being  are  standing  now — and  that 
the  time  will  come  when  we  shall  know  that  it  is  so, 
and  when  all  that  has  concealed  the  Judge  from  us 
shall  be  taken  away."  Doubtless  Christ  is  always 
with  us — always  seeing  us — always  judging  us.  Doubt- 
less "  everywhere  "  in  Scripture  the  idea  is  kept  before 


318  MAURICE'S  THEOLOGICAL  ESSAYS         xviii 

us  of  judgment  in  its  fullest,  largest,  most  natural 
sense,  as  "importing"  not  merely  passing  sentence, 
and  awarding  reward  or  penalty,  but  "  discrimination 
and  discovery.  Everywhere  that  discrimination  or 
discovery  is  supposed  to  be  exercised  over  the  man 
himself,  over  his  internal  character,  over  his  meaning 
and  will."  Granted,  also,  that  men  have,  in  their 
attempts  to  figure  to  themselves  the  "great  assize," 
sometimes  made  strange  work,  and  shown  how  carnal 
their  thoughts  are,  both  in  what  they  expected,  and 
in  the  influence  they  allowed  it  to  have  over  them. 
But  what  of  all  this  ?  Correct  these  gross  ideas,  but 
leave  the  words  of  Scripture  in  their  literal  meaning, 
and  do  not  say  that  all  those  who  receive  them  as 
the  announcement  of  what  is  to  be,  under  conditions 
now  inconceivable  to  man,  must  understand  "the 
substitution  of  a  mere  external  trial  or  examination  " 
for  the  inward  and  daily  trial  of  our  hearts,  as  a  mere 
display  of  "  earthly  pomp  and  ceremonial " — a  re- 
sumption by  Christ  "  of  earthly  conditions  "  ;  or  that, 
because  they  believe  that  at  "  some  distant  unknown 
period  they  shall  be  brought  into  the  presence  of  One 
who  is  now"  not  "far  from  them,"  but  out  of  sight 
— how,  or  in  what  manner  they  know  not — therefore 
they  ;;/z/5/ suppose  that  He  "is  not  now  fulfilling  the 
office  of  a  Judge,  whatever  else  may  be  committed  to 
Him." 

Mr.  Maurice  is  aiming  at  a  high  object.  He  would 
reconcile  the  old  and  the  new.  He  would  disen- 
cumber what  is  popular  of  what  is  vulgar,  confused. 


xviii         MAURICE'S  THEOLOGICAL  ESSAYS  319 

sectarian,  and  preserve  and  illustrate  it  by  disencum- 
bering it.  He  calls  on  us  not  to  be  afraid  of  the 
depths  and  heights,  the  freedom  and  largeness,  the 
"spirit  and  the  truth,"  of  our  own  theology.  It  is  a 
warning  and  a  call  which  every  age  wants.  We 
sympathise  with  his  aim,  with  much  of  his  positive 
teaching,  with  some  of  his  aversions  and  some  of  his 
fears.  We  do  not  respect  him  the  less  for  not  being 
afraid  of  being  called  hard  names.  But  certainly 
such  a  writer  has  need,  in  no  common  degree,  of 
conforming  himself  to  that  wise  maxim,  which  holds 
in  writing  as  well  as  in  art — "  Know  what  you  want 
to  do,  then  do  it." 


XIX 

FREDERICK   DENISON   MAURICE  ^ 

This  Easter  week  we  have  lost  a  man  about  whom 
opinions  and  feelings  were  much  divided,  who  was 
by  many  of  the  best  and  most  thoughtful  among  us 
looked  on  as  the  noblest  and  greatest  of  recent 
English  teachers,  and  who  certainly  had  that  rare 
gift  of  inspiring  enthusiasm  and  trust  among  honest 
and  powerful  minds  in  search  of  guidance,  which 
belongs  to  none  but  to  men  of  a  very  high  order. 
Professor  Maurice  has  ended  a  life  of  the  severest 
and  most  unceasing  toil,  still  working  to  the  utmost 
that  failing  bodily  strength  allowed — still  to  the  last 
in  harness.  The  general  public,  though  his  name  is 
familiar  to  them,  probably  little  measure  the  deep 
and  passionate  affection  with  which  he  was  regarded 
by  the  circle  of  his  friends  and  by  those  whose 
thoughts  and  purposes  he  had  moulded;  or  the 
feeling  which  his  loss  causes  in  them  of  a  blank, 
great  and  not  to  be  filled  up,  not  only  personally  for 
themselves,  but  in   the  agencies  which  are  working 

1  Saturday  Revieic,  6th  April  1872. 


XIX  FREDERICK  DENISON  MAURICE  321 

most  hopefully  in  English  society.  But  even  those 
who  knew  him  least,  and  only  from  the  outside,  and 
whose  points  of  view  least  coincided  with  his,  must 
feel  that  there  has  been,  now  that  we  look  back  on 
his  course,  something  singularly  touching  and  even 
pathetic  in  the  combination  shown  in  all  that  he  did, 
of  high  courage  and  spirit,  and  of  unwearied  faith 
and  vigour,  with  the  deepest  humiUty  and  with  the 
sincerest  disinterestedness  and  abnegation,  which 
never  allowed  him  to  seek  anything  great  for  himself, 
and,  in  fact,  distinguished  and  honoured  as  he  was, 
never  found  it.  For  the  sake  of  his  generation  we 
may  regret  that  he  did  not  receive  the  public  recog- 
nition and  honour  which  were  assuredly  his  due ;  but 
in  truth  his  was  one  of  those  careers  which,  for  their 
own  completeness  and  consistency,  gain  rather  than 
lose  by  escaping  the  distractions  and  false  lights  of 
what  is  called  preferment. 

The  two  features  which  strike  us  at  the  moment 
as  characteristic  of  Mr.  Maurice  as  a  writer  and 
teacher,  besides  the  vast  range  both  of  his  reading 
and  thought,  and  the  singularly  personal  tone  and 
language  of  all  that  he  wrote,  are,  first,  the  combina- 
tion in  him  of  the  most  profound  and  intense 
religiousness  with  the  most  boundless  claim  and 
exercise  of  intellectual  liberty ;  and  next,  the  value 
which  he  set,  exemplifying  his  estimate  in  his  own 
long  and  laborious  course,  on  processes  and  efforts, 
as  compared  with  conclusions  and  definite  results,  in 
that  pursuit  of  truth  which  was  to  him   the   most 

VOL.  II  Y 


322  FREDERICK  DENISON  MAURICE  xix 

sacred  of  duties.  There  is  no  want  of  earnest  and 
fervent  religion  among  us,  intelligent,  well-informed, 
deliberate,  as  well  as  of  religion,  to  which  these  terms 
can  hardly  be  applied.  And  there  is  also  no  want 
of  the  boldest  and  most  daring  freedom  of  investiga- 
tion and  judgment.  But  what  Mr.  Maurice  seemed 
to  see  himself,  and  what  he  endeavoured  to  impress 
on  others,  was  that  religion  and  liberty  are  no  natural 
enemies,  but  that  the  deepest  and  most  absorbing 
forms  of  historical  and  traditional  religion  draw 
strength  and  seriousness  of  meaning,  and  binding 
obligation,  from  an  alliance,  frank  and  unconditional, 
with  what  seem  to  many  the  risks,  the  perilous  risks 
and  chances,  of  freedom. 

It  was  a  position  open  to  obvious  and  formid- 
able criticism  ;  but  against  this  criticism  is  to  be 
set  the  fact,  that  in  a  long  and  energetic  life, 
in  which  amidst  great  trials  and  changes  there 
was  a  singular  uniformity  and  consistency  of  char- 
acter maintained,  he  did  unite  the  two — the  most 
devout  Christianity  with  the  most  fearless  and  un- 
shrinking boldness  in  facing  the  latest  announce- 
ments and  possibilities  of  modern  thought.  That  he 
always  satisfactorily  explained  his  point  of  view  to 
others  is  more  than  can  be  said  ;  but  he  certainly 
satisfied  numbers  of  keen  and  anxious  thinkers,  who 
were  discontented  and  disheartened  both  by  religion 
as  it  is  presented  by  our  great  schools  and  parties, 
and  by  science  as  its  principles  and  consequences 
are  expounded  by  the  leading  philosophical  authori- 


XIX  FREDERICK  DENISON"  MAURICE  323 

ties  of  the  day.  The  other  point  to  which  we  have 
adverted  partly  explains  the  influence  which  he  had 
with  such  minds.  He  had  no  system  to  formulate  or 
to  teach.  He  was  singularly  ready  to  accept,  as 
adequate  expressions  of  those  truths  in  whose  exist- 
ence he  so  persistently  believed,  the  old  consecrated 
forms  in  which  simpler  times  had  attempted  to 
express  them.  He  believed  that  these  truths  are 
wider  and  vaster  than  the  human  mind  which  is  to  be 
made  wiser  and  better  by  them.  And  his  aim  was 
to  reach  up  to  an  ever  more  exact,  and  real,  and 
harmonious  hold  of  these  truths,  which  in  their 
essential  greatness  he  felt  to  be  above  him  ;  to  reach 
to  it  in  life  as  much  as  in  thought.  And  so  to  the 
end  he  was  ever  striving,  not  so  much  to  find  new 
truths  as  to  find  the  heart  and  core  of  old  ones,  the 
truth  of  the  truth,  the  inner  life  and  significance  of 
the  letter,  of  which  he  was  always  loth  to  refuse  the 
traditional  form.  In  these  eff"orts  at  unfolding  and 
harmonising  there  was  considerable  uniformity ;  no 
one  could  mistake  Mr.  Maurice's  manner  of  present- 
ing the  meaning  and  bearing  of  an  article  of  the 
Creed  for  the  manner  of  any  one  else  ;  but  the  result 
of  this  way  of  working,  in  the  effect  of  the  things 
which  he  said,  and  in  his  relations  to  different  bodies 
of  opinion  and  thought  both  in  the  Church  and  in 
society,  was  to  give  the  appearance  of  great  and 
important  changes  in  his  teaching  and  his  general 
point  of  view,  as  life  went  on.  This  governing 
thought   of  his,   of  the  immeasurably  transcendent 


324  FREDERICK  DENISON  MAURICE  xix 

compass  and  height  of  all  truths  compared  with  the 
human  mind  and  spirit  which  was  to  bow  to  them 
and  to  gain  life  and  elevation  by  accepting  them, 
explains  the  curious  and  at  present  almost  unique 
combination  in  him,  of  deep  reverence  for  the  old 
language  of  dogmatic  theology,  and  an  energetic 
maintenance  of  its  fitness  and  value,  with  dissatisfac- 
tion, equally  deep  and  impartially  universal,  at  the 
interpretations  put  on  this  dogmatic  language  by 
modern  theological  schools,  and  at  the  modes  in 
which  its  meaning  is  applied  by  them  both  in  direct- 
ing thought  and  influencing  practice.  This  habit 
of  distinguishing  sharply  and  peremptorily  between 
dogmatic  language  and  the  popular  reading  of  it  at 
any  given  time  is  conspicuous  in  his  earliest  as  in  his 
latest  handling  of  these  subjects ;  in  the  pamphlet  of 
1835,  Subscriptioti  no  Bondage^  explaining  and  defend- 
ing the  old  practice  at  Oxford  ;  and  in  the  papers  and 
letters,  which  have  appeared  from  him  in  periodicals, 
on  the  Athanasian  Creed,  and  which  are,  we  suppose, 
almost  his  last  writings. 

The  world  at  large  thought  Mr.  Maurice  obscure 
and  misty,  and  was,  as  was  natural,  impatient  of  such 
faults.  The  charge  was,  no  doubt,  more  than 
partially  true  ;  and  nothing  but  such  genuine  strength 
and  comprehensive  power  as  his  could  have  pre- 
vented it  from  being  a  fatal  one  to  his  weight  and 
authority.  But  it  is  not  uninstructive  to  remember 
what  was  very  much  at  the  root  of  it.  It  had  its 
origin,  not  altogether,  but  certainly  in  a  great  degree, 


XIX  FREDERICK  DENISON  MAURICE  325 

in  two  of  his  moral  characteristics.  One  was  his 
stubborn,  conscientious  determination,  at  any  cost  of 
awkwardness,  or  apparent  inconsistency,  or  imperfec- 
tion of  statement,  to  say  out  what  he  had  to  say, 
neither  more  nor  less,  just  as  he  thought  it,  and  just 
as  he  felt  it,  with  the  most  fastidious  care  for  truthful 
accuracy  of  meaning.  He  never  would  suffer  what 
he  considered  either  the  connection  or  the  balance 
and  adjustment  of  varied  and  complementary  truths 
to  be  sacrificed  to  force  or  point  of  expression ;  and 
he  had  to  choose  sometimes,  as  all  people  have, 
between  a  blurred,  clumsy,  and  ineffective  picture 
and  a  consciously  incomplete  and  untrue  one.  His 
choice  never  wavered;  and  as  the  artist's  aim  was 
high,  and  his  skill  not  always  equally  at  his  command, 
he  preferred  the  imperfection  which  left  him  the  con- 
sciousness of  honesty.  The  other  cause  which  threw 
a  degree  of  haze  round  his  writings  was  the  personal 
shape  into  which  he  was  so  fond  of  throwing  his 
views.  He  shrunk  from  their  enunciation  as  argu- 
ments and  conclusions  which  claimed  on  their  own 
account  and  by  their  own  title  the  deference  of  all 
who  read  them ;  and  he  submitted  them  as  what  he 
himself  had  found  and  had  been  granted  to  see — the 
lessons  and  convictions  of  his  own  experience.  Sym- 
pathy is,  no  doubt,  a  great  bond  among  all  men ;  but, 
after  all,  men's  experience  and  their  points  of  view 
are  not  all  alike,  and  when  we  are  asked  to  see  with 
another's  eyes,  it  is  not  always  easy.  Mr.  Maurice's 
desire  to  give  the  simplest  and  most  real  form  to  his 


326  FREDERICK  DENISO]^  MAURICE  xix 

thoughts  as  they  arose  in  his  own  mind  contributed 
more  often  than  he  supposed  to  prevent  others  from 
entering  into  his  meaning.  He  asked  them  to  put 
themselves  in  his  place.  He  did  not  sufficiently  put 
himself  in  theirs. 

But  he  has  taught  us  great  lessons,  of  the  sacred- 
ness,  the  largeness,  and,  it  may  be  added,  the 
difficulty  of  truth ;  lessons  of  sympathy  with  one 
another,  of  true  humility  and  self-conquest  in  the 
busy  and  unceasing  activity  of  the  intellectual 
faculties.  He  has  left  no  school  and  no  system,  but 
he  has  left  a  spirit  and  an  example.  We  speak  of 
him  here  only  as  those  who  knew  him  as  all  the 
world  knew  him ;  but  those  who  were  his  friends  are 
never  tired  of  speaking  of  his  grand  simplicity  of 
character,  of  his  tenderness  and  delicacy,  of  the 
irresistible  spell  of  lovableness  which  won  all  within 
its  reach.  They  remember  how  he  spoke,  and  how 
he  read ;  the  tones  of  a  voice  of  singularly  piercing 
clearness,  which  was  itself  a  power  of  interpretation, 
which  revealed  his  own  soul  and  went  straight  to  the 
hearts  of  hearers.  He  has  taken  his  full  share  in 
the  controversies  of  our  days,  and  there  must  be 
many  opinions  both  about  the  line  which  he  took, 
and  even  sometimes  about  the  temper  in  which  he 
carried  on  debate.  But  it  is  nothing  but  the  plainest 
justice  to  say  that  he  was  a  philosopher,  a  theologian, 
and,  we  may  add,  a  prophet,  of  whom,  for  his  great 
gifts,  and,  still  more,  for  his  noble  and  pure  use  of 
them,  the  modern  English  Church  may  well  be  proud. 


XX 

SIR   RICHARD   CHURCH^ 

General  Sir  Richard  Church  died  last  week  at 
Athens.  Many  English  travellers  in  the  East  find 
their  way  to  Athens ;  most  of  them  must  have  heard 
his  name  repeated  there  as  the  name  of  one  closely 
associated  with  the  later  fortunes  of  the  Greek  nation, 
and  linking  the  present  with  times  now  distant ;  some 
of  them  may  have  seen  him,  and  may  remember  the 
slight  wiry  form  which  seemed  to  bear  years  so  lightly, 
the  keen  eye  and  grisled  moustache  and  soldierly 
bearing,  and  perhaps  the  antique  and  ceremonious 
courtesy,  stately  yet  cordial,  recalling  a  type  of 
manners  long  past,  with  which  he  welcomed  those 
who  had  a  claim  on  his  attentions  or  friendly  offices. 
Five  and  forty  years  ago  his  name  was  much  in  men's 
mouths.  He  was  prominent  in  a  band  of  distinguished 
men,  who  represented  a  new  enthusiasm  in  Europe. 
Less  by  what  they  were  able  to  do  than  by  their 
character    and    their   unreserved    self-devotion    and 

1  Guardian,  26th  March  1873. 


328  SIR  RICHARD  CHURCH  xx 

sacrifice,  they  profoundly  affected  public  opinion, 
and  disarmed  the  jealousy  of  absolutist  courts  and 
governments  in  favour  of  a  national  movement, 
which,  whether  disappointment  may  have  followed 
its  success,  was  one  of  the  most  just  and  salutary  of 
revolutions — the  deliverance  of  a  Christian  nation 
from  the  hopeless  tyranny  of  the  Turks. 

He  was  one  of  the  few  remaining  survivors  of  the 
generation  which  had  taken  part  in  the  great  French 
war  and  in  the  great  changes  resulting  from  it — 
changes  which  have  in  time  given  way  to  vaster 
alterations,  and  been  eclipsed  by  them.  He  began 
his  military  life  as  a  boy -ensign  in  one  of  the 
regiments  forming  part  of  the  expedition  which, 
under  Sir  Ralph  Abercromby,  drove  the  French  out 
of  Egypt  in  1801 ;  and  on  the  shores  of  the  Medi- 
terranean, where  his  career  began,  it  was  for  the  most 
part  continued  and  finished.  His  genius  led  him  to 
the  more  irregular  and  romantic  forms  of  military 
service ;  he  had  the  gift  of  personal  influence,  and 
the  power  of  fascinating  and  attaching  to  himself, 
with  extraordinary  loyalty,  the  people  of  the  South. 
His  adventurous  temper,  his  sympathetic  nature,  his 
chivalrous  courtesy,  his  thorough  trustworthiness  and 
sincerity,  his  generosity,  his  high  spirit  of  nobleness 
and  honour,  won  for  him,  from  Italians  and  Greeks, 
not  only  that  deep  respect  which  was  no  unusual 
tribute  from  them  to  English  honesty  and  strength 
and  power  of  command,  but  that  love,  and  that 
affectionate  and  alniost  tender  veneration,  for  which 


XX  SIR  RICHARD  CHURCH  329 

strong  and  resolute  Englishmen  have  not  always  cared 
from  races  of  whose  characteristic  faults  they  were 
impatient. 

His  early  promise  in  the  regular  service  was 
brilliant ;  as  a  young  staff- officer,  and  by  a  staff- 
officer's  qualities  of  sagacity,  activity,  and  decision, 
he  did  distinguished  service  at  Maida ;  and  had  he 
followed  the  movement  which  made  Spain  the  great 
battle-ground  for  English  soldiers,  he  had  every  pros- 
pect of  earning  a  high  place  among  those  who  fought 
under  Wellington.  But  he  clung  to  the  Mediterranean. 
He  was  employed  in  raising  and  organising  those 
foreign  auxiliary  corps  which  it  was  thought  were 
necessary  to  eke  out  the  comparatively  scanty 
numbers  of  the  English  armies,  and  to  keep  up 
threatening  demonstrations  on  the  outskirts  of  the 
French  Empire.  It  was  in  this  service  that  his  con- 
nection with  the  Greek  people  was  first  formed,  and 
his  deep  and  increasing  interest  in  its  welfare  created. 
He  was  commissioned  to  form  first  one,  and  then  a 
second,  regiment  of  Greek  irregulars ;  and  from  the 
Ionian  Islands,  from  the  mainland  of  Albania,  from 
the  Morea,  chiefs  and  bands,  accustomed  to  the 
mountain  warfare,  half  patriotic,  half  predatory, 
carried  on  by  the  more  energetic  Greek  highlanders 
against  the  Turks,  flocked  to  the  English  standards. 
The  operations  in  which  they  were  engaged  were 
desultory,  and  of  no  great  account  in  the  general 
result  of  the  gigantic  contest ;  but  they  made  Colonel 
Church's  name  familiar  to  the  Greek  population,  who 


330  SIR  illCHARD  CHURCtt  xx 

were  hoping,  amid  the  general  confusion,  for  an 
escape  from  the  tyranny  of  the  Turks.  But  his  con- 
nection with  Greece  was  for  some  time  delayed.  His 
peculiar  qualifications  pointed  him  out  as  a  fit  man 
to  be  a  medium  of  communication  between  the 
English  Government  and  the  foreign  armies  which 
were  operating  on  the  outside  of  the  circle  within 
which  the  decisive  struggle  was  carried  on  against 
Napoleon ;  and  he  was  the  English  Military  Com- 
missioner attached  to  the  Austrian  armies  in  Italy  in 
1814  and  1815. 

At  the  Peace,  his  eagerness  for  daring  and 
adventurous  enterprise  was  tempted  by  great  offers 
from  the  Neapolitan  Government.  The  war  had 
left  brigandage,  allied  to  a  fierce  spirit  of  revolutionary 
freemasonry,  all-powerful  in  the  south  of  Italy ;  and 
a  stern  and  resolute,  yet  perfectly  honest  and  just 
hand,  was  needed  to  put  it  down.  He  accepted  the 
commission ;  he  was  reckless  of  conspiracy  and 
threats  of  assassination ;  he  was  known  to  be  no 
sanguinary  and  merciless  lover  of  severity,  but  he  was 
known  also  to  be  fearless  and  inexorable  against 
crime ;  and,  not  without  some  terrible  examples,  yet 
with  complete  success,  he  delivered  the  south  of 
Italy  from  the  scourge.  But  his  thoughts  had  always 
been  turned  towards  Greece ;  at  last  the  call  came, 
and  he  threw  himself  with  all  his  hopes  and  all  his 
fortunes  into  a  struggle  which  more  than  any  other 
that  history  can  show  engaged  at  the  time  the  interest 
of  Europe.     His  first  efforts  resulted  in  a  disastrous 


XX  SIR  RICHARD  CHURCH  331 

defeat  against  overwhelming  odds,  for  which,  as  is 
natural,  he  has  been  severely  criticised ;  his  critics 
have  shown  less  quickness  in  perceiving  the  quahties 
which  he  displayed  after  it — his  unshaken,  silent 
fortitude,  the  power  with  which  he  kept  together  and 
saved  the  wrecks  of  his  shattered  and  disheartened 
volunteer  army,  the  confidence  in  himself  with  which 
he  inspired  them,  the  skill  with  which  he  extricated 
them  from  their  dangers  in  the  face  of  a  strong  and 
formidable  enemy,  the  humanity  which  he  strove  so 
earnestly  by  word  and  example  to  infuse  into  the 
barbarous  warfare  customary  between  Greeks  and 
Turks,  the  tenacity  with  which  he  clung  to  the  fast- 
nesses of  Western  Greece,  obtaining  by  his  per- 
severance from  the  diplomacy  of  Europe  a  more 
favourable  line  of  boundary  for  the  new  nation  which 
it  at  length  recognised.  To  this  cause  he  gave  up 
everything ;  personal  risks  cannot  be  counted ;  but 
he  threw  away  all  prospects  in  England ;  he  made 
no  bargains;  he  sacrificed  freely  to  the  necessities 
of  the  struggle  any  pecuniary  resource  that  he  could 
command,  neither  requiring  nor  receiving  any  repay- 
ment. He  threw  in  his  lot  with  the  people  for  whom 
he  had  surrendered  everything,  in  order  to  take  part 
in  their  deliverance.  Since  his  arrival  in  Greece  in 
1827  he  has  never  turned  his  face  westwards.  He 
took  the  part  which  is  perhaps  the  only  becoming 
and  justifiable  one  for  the  citizen  of  one  State  who 
permits  himself  to  take  arms,  even  in  the  cause  of 
independence,   for  another;    having  fought   for  the 


332  SIR  RICHARD  CHURCH  xx 

Greeks,  he  lived  with  them,  and  shared,  for  good  and 
for  evil,  their  fortunes. 

For  more  than  forty  years  he  has  resided  at  Athens 
under  the  shadow  of  the  great  rock  of  the  Acropolis. 
Distinguished  by  all  the  honours  the  Greek  nation 
could  bestow,  military  or  political,  he  has  lived  in 
modest  retirement,  only  on  great  emergencies  taking 
any  prominent  part  in  the  political  questions  of 
Greece,  but  always  throwing  his  influence  on  the 
side  of  right  and  honesty.  The  course  of  things  in 
Greece  was  not  always  what  an  educated  Englishman 
could  wish  it  to  be.  But  whatever  his  judgment,  or, 
on  occasion,  his  action  might  be,  there  never  could 
be  a  question,  with  his  friends  any  more  than  with 
his  opponents — enemies  he  could  scarcely  be  said  to 
have — as  to  the  straightforwardness,  the  pure  motives, 
the  unsullied  honour  of  anything  that  he  did  or 
anything  that  he  advised.  The  Greeks  saw  among 
them  one  deeply  sympathising  with  all  that  they 
cared  for,  commanding,  if  he  had  pleased  to  work 
for  it,  considerable  influence  out  of  Greece,  the 
intimate  friend  of  a  Minister  like  Sir  Edmund  Lyons, 
yet  keeping  free  from  the  temptation  to  make  that 
use  of  influence  which  seems  so  natural  to  politicians 
in  a  place  like  Athens ;  thinking  much  of  Greece  and 
of  the  interests  of  his  friends  there,  but  thinking  as 
much  of  truth  and  justice  and  conscience ;  hating 
intrigue  and  trick,  and  shaming  by  his  indignant 
rebuke  any  proposal  of  underhand  courses  that  might 
be  risked  in  his  presence. 


XX  SIR  RICHARD  CHURCH  333 

The  course  of  things,  the  change  of  ideas  and  of 
men,  threw  him  more  and  more  out  of  any  forward 
and  prominent  place  in  the  affairs  of  Greece. 
But  his  presence  in  Athens  was  felt  everywhere. 
There  was  a  man  who  had  given  up  everything 
for  Greece  and  sought  nothing  in  return.  His  blame- 
less unselfishness,  his  noble  elevation  of  character, 
were  a  warning  and  a  rebuke  to  the  faults  which 
have  done  so  much  mischief  to  the  progress  of 
the  nation ;  and  yet  every  Greek  in  Athens  knew 
that  no  one  among  them  was  more  jealous  of  the 
honour  of  the  nation  or  more  anxious  for  its  good. 
To  a  new  political  society,  freshly  exposed  to  the 
temptations  of  party  struggles  for  power,  no  greater 
service  can  be  rendered  than  a  public  life  absolutely 
clear  from  any  suspicion  of  self-seeking,  governed 
uninterruptedly  and  long  by  public  spirit,  public  ends, 
and  a  strong  sense  of  duty.  Such  a  service  General 
Church  has  rendered  to  his  adopted  country.  During 
his  residence  among  them  for  nearly  half  a  century 
they  have  become  familiar,  not  in  word,  but  in  living 
reality,  with  some  of  the  best  things  which  the  West 
has  to  impart  to  the  East.  They  have  had  among 
them  an  example  of  English  principle,  English  truth, 
English  high-souled  disinterestedness,  and  that  noble 
English  faith  which,  in  a  great  cause,  would  rather 
hope  in  vain  than  not  hope  at  all.  They  have  learned 
to  venerate  all  this,  and,  some  of  them,  to  love  it. 


XXI 

DEATH  OF  BISHOP  WILBERFORCE  ^ 

The  beautiful  summer  weather  which  came  on  us  at 
the  beginning  of  this  week  gives  by  contrast  a  strange 
and  terrible  point  to  the  calamity,  the  announcement 
of  which  sent  such  a  shock  through  the  whole  country 
on  Monday  last.  Summer  days  in  all  their  brilliance 
seemed  come  at  last,  after  a  long  waiting  which  made 
them  the  more  delightful.  But  as  people  came  down 
to  breakfast  on  that  morning,  or  as  they  gathered  at 
railway  stations  on  their  way  to  business,  the  almost 
incredible  tidings  met  them  that  the  Bishop  of  Win- 
chester was  dead ;  that  he  had  been  killed  by  a  fall 
from  his  horse.  In  a  moment,  by  the  most  trivial  of 
accidents,  one  of  the  foremost  and  most  stirring  men 
of  our  generation  had  passed  away  from  the  scene  in 
which  his  part  was  so  large  a  one.  With  everything 
calm  and  peaceful  round  him,  in  the  midst  of  the  keen 
but  tranquil  enjoyment  of  a  summer  evening  ride 
with  a  friend  through  some  of  the  most  charming 
scenery   in    England,    looking   forward    to    meeting 

^  Guardian,  23rd  July  1873, 


XXI  DEATH  OF  BISHOP  WILBERFORCE  335 

another  friend,  and  to  the  pleasure  which  a  quiet 
Sunday  brings  to  hard-worked  men  in  fine  weather, 
and  a  pleasant  country  house,  the  blow  fell.  The 
moment  before,  as  Lord  Granville  remarks,  he  had 
given  expression  to  the  fulness  of  his  enjoyment. 
He  was  rejoicing  in  the  fine  weather,  he  was  keenly 
noticing  the  beauty  of  the  scenery  at  every  point  of 
the  way ;  with  his  characteristic  love  of  trees  he  was 
noticing  the  different  kinds  and  the  soils  which  suited 
them ;  especially  he  was  greatly  pleased  with  his 
horse.  There  comes  a  slight  dip  in  the  smooth  turf; 
the  horse  stumbles  and  recovers  himself  unhurt ;  but 
in  that  short  interval  of  time  all  has  vanished,  all 
things  earthly,  from  that  quick  eye  and  that  sensitive 
and  sympathetic  mind.  It  is  indeed  tragic.  He  is 
said  to  have  thought  with  distress  of  a  lingering  end. 
He  was  spared  it.     He  died  as  a  soldier  dies. 

A  shock  like  this  brings  with  it  also  a  shock  of 
new  knowledge  and  appreciation  of  things.  We  are 
made  to  feel  with  a  new  force  what  it  is  that  we  have 
lost,  and  to  understand  more  exactly  what  is  the  pro- 
portion of  what  we  have  lost  to  what  we  still  retain. 
To  friends  and  opponents  the  Bishop  of  Winchester 
could  not  but  be,  under  any  circumstances,  a  person 
of  the  greatest  importance.  But  few  of  us,  probably, 
measured  fully  and  accurately  the  place  which  he 
filled  among  us.  We  are  better  aware  of  it  now 
when  he  has  been  taken  away  from  us.  Living 
among  us,  and  acting  before  us  from  day  to  day,  the 
object  of  each  day's  observation  and  criticism,  under 


336  DEATH  OF  BISHOP  WILBERFORCE  xxi 

each  day's  varying  circumstances  and  feelings,  within 
our  reach  ahvays  if  we  wanted  to  see  him  or  to  hear 
him,  he  was  presented  to  our  thoughts  in  that  partial 
disclosure,  and  that  everyday  homeliness,  which  as 
often  disguise  the  true  and  complete  significance  of  a 
character,  as  they  give  substance  and  reaUty  to  our 
conceptions  of  it.  As  the  man's  course  moves  on, 
we  are  apt  to  lose  in  our  successive  judgments  of  the 
separate  steps  of  it — it  may  be  steps  of  great  im- 
mediate interest — our  sense  of  its  connection  and 
tendency,  of  the  true  measure  of  it  as  a  whole,  of  the 
degree  in  which  character  is  growing  and  rising,  or, 
on  the  other  hand,  falling  or  standing  still.  The 
Bishop  of  Winchester  had  many  admirers — many  who 
deeply  loved  and  trusted  him — many  who,  in  the  face 
of  a  good  deal  of  suspicion  and  hostile  comment, 
stoutly  insisted  on  the  high  estimate  which  they  had 
formed  of  him.  But  even  among  them,  and  certainly 
in  the  more  indifferent  public,  there  were  few  who 
had  rightly  made  it  clear  to  their  own  minds  what  he 
had  really  grown  to  be  both  in  the  Church  and  the 
country. 

For  it  is  obvious,  at  the  first  glance  now  that  he  is 
gone,  that  there  is  no  one  who  can  fill  the  place 
which  he  filled.  It  seems  to  us  beyond  dispute  that 
he  has  been  the  greatest  Bishop  the  English  Church 
has  seen  for  a  century  and  a  half.  We  do  not  say 
the  greatest  man,  but  the  greatest  Bishop ;  the  one 
among  the  leaders  of  the  English  Church  who  most 
adequately  understood  the  relations  of  his  office,  not 


XXI  DEATH  OF  BISHOP  WILBERFORCE  337 

only  to  the  Church,  but  to  his  times  and  his  country, 
and  who  most  adequately  fulfilled  his  own  conception 
of  them.  We  are  very  far  from  saying  this  because 
of  his  exuberant  outfit  of  powers  and  gifts ;  because 
of  his  versatility,  his  sympathetic  nature,  his  eager 
interest  in  all  that  interested  his  fellows,  his  inex- 
haustible and  ready  resources  of  thought  and  speech, 
of  strong  and  practical  good  sense,  of  brilliant  or 
persuasive  or  pathetic  eloquence.  In  all  this  he  had 
equals  and  rivals,  though  perhaps  he  had  not  many 
in  the  completeness  and  balance  of  his  powers.  Nor 
do  we  say  anything  of  those  gifts,  partly  of  the 
intellect,  but  also  of  the  soul  and  temper  and  char- 
acter, by  which  he  was  able  at  once  to  charm  without 
tiring  the  most  refined  and  fastidious  society,  to  draw 
to  him  the  hearts  of  hard-working  and  anxious  clergy- 
men, and  to  enchain  the  attention  of  the  dullest  and 
most  ignorant  of  rustic  congregations.  All  these  are, 
as  it  seems  to  us,  the  subordinate,  and  not  the  most 
interesting,  parts  of  what  he  was ;  they  were  on  the 
surface  and  attracted  notice,  and  the  parts  were  often 
mistaken  for  the  whole.  Nor  do  we  forget  what 
often  offended  even  equitable  judges,  disliking  all 
appearance  of  management  and  mere  adroitness — or 
what  was  often  objected  against  his  proceedings  by 
opponents  at  least  as  unscrupulous  as  they  wished 
him  to  be  thought.  We  are  far  from  thinking  that 
his  long  career  was  free  from  either  mistakes  or 
faults ;  it  is  not  likely  that  a  course  steered  amid 
such  formidable  and  perplexing  difficulties,  and 
VOL.  11  z 


338  DEATH  OF  BISHOP  WILBERFORCE  xxi 

Steered  with  such  boldness  and  such  httle  attempt 
to  evade  them,  should  not  offer  repeated  occasions 
not  only  for  ill-natured,  but  for  grave  and  serious 
objections. 

But  looking  over  that  long  course  of  his  Episco- 
pate, from  1845  to  the  present  year,  we  see  in  him, 
in  an  eminent  and  unique  degree,  two  things.  He 
had  a  distinct  and  statesmanlike  idea  of  Church 
policy ;  and  he  had  a  new  idea  of  the  functions  of  a 
Bishop,  and  of  what  a  Bishop  might  do  and  ought  to 
do.  And  these  two  ideas  he  steadily  kept  in  view 
and  acted  upon  with  increasing  clearness  in  his 
purpose  and  unflagging  energy  in  action.  He  grasped 
in  all  its  nobleness  and  fulness  and  height  the  con- 
ception of  the  Church  as  a  great  religious  society  of 
Divine  origin,  with  many  sides  and  functions,  with 
diversified  gifts  and  ever  new  relations  to  altering 
times,  but  essentially,  and  above  all  things,  a  religious 
society.  To  serve  that  society,  to  call  forth  in  it  the 
consciousness  of  its  calling  and  its  responsibilities,  to 
strengthen  and  put  new  hfe  into  its  organisation, 
to  infuse  ardour  and  enthusiasm  and  unity  into  its 
efforts,  to  encourage  and  foster  everything  that  har- 
monised with  its  principle  and  purpose,  to  watch 
against  the  counteracting  influences  of  self-willed  or 
ignorant  narrowness,  to  adjust  its  substantial  rights 
and  its  increasing  activity  to  the  new  exigencies  of 
political  changes,  to  elicit  from  the  Church  all  that 
could  command  the  respect  and  win  the  sympathy 
and  confidence  of  Englishmen,  and  make  its  presence 


XXI  DEATH  OF  BISHOP  WILBERFORCE  339 

recognised  as  a  supreme  blessing  by  those  whom 
nothing  but  what  was  great  and  real  in  its  benefits 
would  satisfy — this  was  the  aim  from  which,  however 
perplexed  or  wavering  or  inconsistent  he  may  have 
been  at  times,  he  never  really  swerved.  In  the 
breadth  and  largeness  of  his  principle,  in  the  freedom 
and  variety  of  its  practical  applications,  in  the  dis- 
tinctness of  his  purposes  and  the  intensity  of  his 
convictions,  he  was  an  example  of  high  statesman- 
ship common  in  no  age  of  the  Church,  and  in  no 
branch  of  it.  And  all  this  rested  on  the  most  pro- 
found personal  religion  as  its  foundation,  a  religion 
which  became  in  time  one  of  very  definite  doctrinal 
preferences,  but  of  wide  sympathies,  and  which  was 
always  of  very  exacting  claims  for  the  undivided  work 
and  efforts  of  a  lifetime. 

When  he  became  Bishop  he  very  soon  revolu- 
tionised the  old  notion  of  a  Bishop's  duties.  He 
threw  himself  without  any  regard  to  increasing  trouble 
and  labour  on  the  great  power  of  personal  influence. 
In  every  corner  of  his  diocese  he  made  himself  known 
and  felt ;  in  all  that  interested  its  clergy  or  its  people 
he  took  his  part  more  and  more.  He  went  forth  to 
meet  men ;  he  made  himself  their  guest  and  com- 
panion as  well  as  their  guide  and  chief;  he  was  more 
often  to  be  found  moving  about  his  diocese  than  he 
was  to  be  found  at  his  own  home  at  Cuddesdon. 
The  whole  tone  of  communication  between  Bishop 
and  people  rose  at  once  in  freedom  and  in  spiritual 
elevation  and  earnestness ;  it  was  at  once  less  formal 


340  DEATH  OF  BISHOP  WILBERFORCE  xxi 

and  more  solemnly  practical.  He  never  spared  his 
personal  presence ;  always  ready  to  show  himself, 
always  ready  to  bring  the  rarer  and  more  impressive 
rites  of  the  Church,  such  as  Ordination,  within  the 
view  of  people  at  a  distance  from  his  Palace  or 
Cathedral,  he  was  never  more  at  his  ease  than  in  a 
crowd  of  new  faces,  and  never  exhausted  and  worn 
out  in  what  he  had  to  say  to  fresh  listeners.  Gather- 
ing men  about  him  at  one  time ;  turning  them  to 
account,  assigning  them  tasks,  pressing  the  willing, 
shaming  the  indolent  or  the  reluctant,  at  another; 
travelling  about  with  the  rapidity  and  system  of  an 
officer  inspecting  his  positions,  he  infused  into  the 
diocese  a  spirit  and  zeal  which  nothing  but  such 
labour  and  sympathy  could  give,  and  bound  it 
together  by  the  bands  of  a  strong  and  wise  organ- 
isation. 

What  he  did  was  but  a  very  obvious  carrying  out 
of  the  idea  of  the  Episcopal  office ;  but  it  had  not 
seemed  necessary  once,  and  his  merit  was  that  he 
saw  both  that  it  was  necessary  and  practicable.  It  is 
he  who  set  the  standard  of  what  is  now  expected,  and 
is  more  or  less  familiar,  in  all  Bishops.  And  as  he 
began  so  he  went  on  to  the  last.  He  never  flagged, 
he  never  grew  tired  of  the  continual  and  varied  inter- 
course which  he  kept  up  with  his  clergy  and  people. 
To  the  last  he  worked  his  diocese  as  much  as  possible 
not  from  a  distance,  but  from  local  points  which 
brought  him  into  closer  communication  with  his 
flock.     London,  with  its  great  interests  and  its  great 


XXI  DEATH  OF  BISHOP  WILBERFORCE  341 

attractions,  social  and  political,  never  kept  away  one 
who  was  so  keenly  alive  to  them,  and  so  prominent 
in  all  that  was  eventful  in  his  time,  from  attending  to 
the  necessities  and  claims  of  his  rural  parishes.  What 
his  work  was  to  the  very  last,  how  much  there  was  in 
him  of  unabated  force,  of  far-seeing  judgment,  of 
noble  boldness  and  earnestness,  of  power  over  the 
souls  and  minds  of  men  in  many  ways  divided,  a 
letter  from  Dr.  Monsell  ^  in  our  columns  shows. 

^  .  .  .  The  shock  that  the  sudden  announcement  of  an  event 
so  solemn  must  ever  give,  was  tenfold  great  to  one  who,  like  my- 
self, had  been,  during  the  past  week,  closely  associated  with  him 
in  anxious  deliberations  as  to  the  best  means  of  meeting  the  various 
difficulties  and  dangers  with  which  the  Church  is  at  present  sur- 
rounded. 

He  had  gathered  round  him,  as  was  his  annual  wont,  his  Arch- 
deacons and  Rural  Deans,  to  deliberate  for  the  Church's  interests  ; 
and  in  his  opening  address,  and  conduct  of  a  most  important 
meeting,  never  had  he  shone  out  more  clearly  in  intellectual  vigour, 
in  theological  soundness,  in  moral  boldness,  in  Christian  gentleness 
and  love. 

.  .  .  He  spoke  upon  the  gravest  questions  of  the  day — 
questions  which  require  more  than  they  generally  receive,  delicate 
handling.  He  divided  from  the  evil  of  things,  which  some  in  the 
spirit  of  party  condemn  wholesale,  the  hidden  good  which  lies 
wrapt  up  in  them,  and  which  it  would  be  sin  as  well  as  folly  to 
sweep  away.  He  made  every  man  who  heard  him  feel  the  blessing 
of  having  in  the  Church  such  a  veteran  leader,  and  drew  forth  from 
more  than  one  there  the  openly  expressed  hope  that  as  he  had  in 
bygone  days  been  the  bold  and  cautious  controller  of  an  earlier 
movement  in  the  right  direction,  so  now  he  would  save  to  the 
Church  some  of  her  precious  things  which  rude  men  would  sweep 
away,  and  help  her  to  regain  what  is  essential  to  her  spiritual 
existence  without  risking  the  sacredness  of  private  life,  the  purity 
of  private  thoughts,  the  sense  of  direct  responsibility  between  God 


342  DEATH  OF  BISHOP  WILBERFORCE  xxi 

He  had  a  great  and  all-important  place  in  a  very 
critical  moment,  to  which  he  brought  a  seriousness  of 
purpose,  a  power  and  ripeness  of  counsel,  and  a  fear- 
lessness distinctly  growing  up  to  the  last.  It  is 
difficult  to  see  who  will  bend  the  bow  which  he  has 
dropped. 

and  the  soul,  which  are  some  of  the  most  distinctive  characteristics 
of  our  dear  Church  of  England. 

From  his  council  chamber  in  Winchester  House  I  went  direct 
with  him  to  the  greater  council  chamber  of  St.  Stephen's  to  hear  him 
there  \dndicate  the  rights  and  privileges  of  his  order,  and  beat  back 
the  assaults  of  those  who,  in  high  places,  think  that  by  a  speech 
in,  or  a  vote  of,  either  house  they  can  fashion  the  Church  as  they 
please.  Never  did  he  speak  with  more  point  and  power  ;  and 
never  did  he  seem  to  have  won  more  surely  the  entire  sympathy  of 
the  house. 

To  gather  in  overwhelming  numbers  round  him  in  the  evening 
his  London  clergy  and  their  families,  to  meet  them  all  with  the 
kind  cordiality  of  a  real  father  and  friend,  to  run  on  far  into  the 
middle  of  the  night  in  this  laborious  endeavour  to  please — was 
"the  last  effort  of  his  toilsome  day." 


XXII 

RETIREMENT  OF  THE  PROVOST  OF 
ORIEL  ^ 

Dr.  Hawkins,  the  Provost  of  Oriel,  has  resigned  the 
Provostship.  He  has  held  it  from  1828,  within  four 
years  of  half  a  century.  The  time  during  which  he 
has  presided  over  his  college  has  been  one  of  the 
most  eventful  periods  in  the  history  of  the  University ; 
it  has  been  a  time  of  revolt  against  custom,  of  reform, 
of  keen  conflict,  of  deep  changes ;  and  in  all  con- 
nected with  these  he  has  borne  a  part,  second  to 
none  in  prominence,  in  importance,  and  we  must 
add,  in  dignity.  No  name  of  equal  distinction  has 
disappeared  from  the  list  of  Heads  of  Houses  since 
the  venerable  President  of  Magdalen  passed  away. 
But  Dr.  Routh,  though  he  watched  with  the  keenest 
intelligence,  and  not  without  sympathy,  all  that  went 
on  in  the  days  into  which  his  life  had  been  prolonged, 
watched  it  with  the  habits  and  thoughts  of  days  long 
departed ;  he  had  survived  from  the  days  of  Bishop 

1  Guardia?i,  4th  November  1874. 


344:    RETIREMEXT  OF  THE  PROVOST  OF  ORIEL  xxii 

Home  and  Dr.  Parr  far  into  our  new  and  strange 
century,  to  which  he  did  not  belong,  and  he  excited 
its  interest  as  a  still  living  example  of  what  men  were 
before  the  French  Revolution.  The  eminence  of  the 
Provost  of  Oriel  is  of  another  kind.  He  calls  forth 
interest  because  among  all  recent  generations  of 
Oxford  men,  and  in  all  their  restless  and  exciting 
movements,  he  has  been  a  foremost  figure.  He 
belongs  to  modern  Oxford,  its  daring  attempts,  its 
fierce  struggles,  its  successes,  and  its  failures.  He 
was  a  man  of  whom  not  only  ever}'  one  heard,  but 
whom  ever}'  one  saw ;  for  he  was  much  in  public,  and 
his  unsparing  sense  of  public  duty  made  him  regularly 
present  in  his  place  at  Council,  at  Convocation,  at 
the  University  Church,  at  College  chapel.  The  out- 
ward look  of  Oxford  will  be  altered  by  the  disappear- 
ance in  its  ceremonies  and  gatherings  of  his  familiar 
form  and  countenance. 

He  would  anywhere  have  been  a  remarkable  man. 
His  active  and  independent  mind,  with  its  keen, 
discriminating,  practical  intelligence,  was  formed 
and  disciplined  amid  that  company  of  distinguished 
scholars  and  writers  who,  at  Oxford,  in  the  second 
decade  of  the  centur}-  were  revolted  by  the  scandalous 
inertness  and  self-indulgence  of  the  place,  'with  its 
magnificent  resources  squandered  and  wasted,  its, 
stupid  orthodoxy  of  routine,  its  insensibility  to  the 
questions  and  the  dangers  rising  all  round ;  men 
such  as  Keble,  Arnold,  Davison,  Copleston,  \Miately. 
These  men,  different  as  they  were  from  one  another, 


XXII  RETIREMENT  OF  THE  PROVOST  OF  ORIEL   345 

all  represented  the  awakening  but  still  imperfect  con- 
sciousness that  a  University  life  ought  to  be  some- 
thing higher  than  one  of  literary  idleness,  given  up 
to  the  frivolities  of  mere  elegant  scholarship,  and  to 
be  crowned  at  last  by  comfortable  preferment ;  that 
there  was  much  difficult  work  to  be  seriously  thought 
about  and  done,  and  that  men  were  placed  at  Oxford 
under  heavy  responsibilities  to  use  their  thoughts  and 
their  leisure  for  the  direct  service  of  their  generation. 
Clever  fops  and  dull  pedants  joined  in  sneering  at 
this  new  activity  and  inquisitiveness  of  mind,  and 
this  grave  interest  and  employment  of  intellect  on 
questions  and  in  methods  outside  the  customary  line 
of  University  studies  and  prejudices ;  but  the  men 
were  too  powerful,  and  their  work  too  genuine  and 
effective,  and  too  much  in  harmony  with  the  temper 
and  tendencies  of  the  time,  to  be  stopped  by  im- 
pertinence and  obstructiveness.  Dr.  Hawkins  was 
one  of  those  who  made  the  Oriel  Common-room  a 
place  of  keen  discussion  and  brilliant  conversation, 
and,  for  those  days,  of  bold  speculation ;  while  the 
College  itself  reflected  something  of  the  vigour  and  ac- 
complishments of  the  Common-room.  Dr.  Newman, 
in  the  Apologia^  has  told  us,  in  touching  terms  of 
acknowledgment,  what  Dr.  Hawkins  was  when,  fifty 
years  ago,  the  two  minds  first  came  into  close  con- 
tact, and  what  intellectual  services  he  believed  Dr. 
Hawkins  had  rendered  him.  He  tells  us,  too,  how 
Dr.  Hawkins  had  profoundly  impressed  him  by  a 
work  in  which,  with  characteristic  independence  and 


34G    RETIREMENT  OF  THE  PROVOST  OF  ORIEL   xxii 

guarded  caution  equally  characteristic,  he  cuts  across 
popular  prejudices  and  confusions  of  thought,  and 
shows  himself  original  in  discerning  and  stating 
an  obvious  truth  which  had  escaped  other  people — 
his  work  on  Unauthoritative  Tradition.  His  logical 
acuteness,  his  habits  of  disciplined  accuracy,  ab- 
horrent and  impatient  of  all  looseness  of  thinking 
and  expression,  his  conscientious  efforts  after  sub- 
stantial reality  in  his  sharpest  distinctions,  his  capacity 
for  taking  trouble,  his  serious  and  strong  sense  of  the 
debt  involved  in  the  possession  of  intellectual  power 
— all  this  would  have  made  him  eminent,  whatever 
the  times  in  which  he  lived. 

But  the  times  in  which  we  live  and  what  they 
bring  with  them  mould  most  of  us ;  and  the  times 
shaped  the  course  of  the  Provost  of  Oriel,  and  turned 
his  activity  into  a  channel  of  obstinate  and  prolonged 
antagonism,  of  resistance  and  protest,  most  con- 
scientious but  most  uncompromising,  against  two 
great  successive  movements,  both  of  which  he  con- 
demned as  unbalanced  and  recoiled  from  as  revolu- 
tionary— the  Tractarian  first,  and  then  the  Liberal 
movement  in  Oxford.  Of  the  former,  it  is  not  per- 
haps too  much  to  say  that  he  was  in  Oxford,  at  least, 
the  ablest  and  most  hurtful  opponent.  From  his 
counsels,  from  his  guarded  and  measured  attacks, 
from  the  power  given  him  by  a  partial  agreement 
against  popular  fallacies  with  parts  of  its  views,  from 
his  severe  and  unflinching  determination,  it  received 
its  heaviest  blows   and  suffered  its  greatest  losses. 


XXII  RETIREMENT  OF  THE  PROVOST  OF  ORIEL   347 

He  detested  what  he  held  to  be  its  anti-Liberal 
temper,  and  its  dogmatic  assertions ;  he  resented  its 
taking  out  of  his  hands  a  province  of  theology  which 
he  and  Whately  had  made  their  own,  that  relating  to 
the  Church;  he  thought  its  tone  of  feeling  and  its 
imaginative  and  poetical  side  exaggerated  or  childish  ; 
and  he  could  not  conceive  of  its  position  except  as 
involving  palpable  dishonesty.  No  one  probably 
guided  with  such  clear  and  self-possessed  purpose 
that  policy  of  extreme  measures,  which  contributed 
to  bring  about,  if  it  did  not  itself  cause,  the  break-up 
of  1845.  Then  succeeded  the  great  Liberal  tide 
with  its  demands  for  extensive  and  immediate 
change,  its  anti-ecclesiastical  spirit,  its  scarcely  dis- 
guised scepticism,  its  daring  philosophical  and  critical 
enterprises.  By  degrees  it  became  clear  that  the 
impatience  and  intolerance  which  had  purged  the 
University  of  so  many  Churchmen  had,  after  all,  left 
the  Church  movement  itself  untouched,  to  assume  by 
degrees  proportions  scarcely  dreamed  of  when  it 
began ;  but  that  what  the  defeat  of  the  Tractarians 
really  had  done  was,  to  leave  the  University  at  the 
mercy  of  Liberals  to  whom  what  had  been  called 
Liberalism  in  the  days  of  Whately  was  mere  blind 
and  stagnant  Conservatism. 

One  war  was  no  sooner  over  than  the  Provost 
of  Oriel  found  another  even  more  formidable  on  his 
hands.  The  most  dauntless  and  most  unshaken  of 
combatants,  he  faced  his  new  antagonists  with  the 
same  determination,  the  same  unshrinking  sense  of 


348    RETIREMENT  OF  THE  PROVOST  OF  ORIEL   xxii 

duty  with  which  he  had  fought  his  old  ones.  He 
used  the  high  authority  and  influence  which  his 
position  and  his  character  justly  gave  him,  to  resist 
or  to  control,  as  far  as  he  could,  the  sweeping  changes 
which,  while  bringing  new  life  into  Oxford,  have  done 
so  much  to  break  up  her  connection  of  centuries 
with  the  Church.  He  boldly  confronted  the  new 
spirit  of  denial  and  unbeHef.  He  wrote,  he  preached, 
he  published,  as  he  had  done  against  other  adversaries, 
always  with  measured  and  dignified  argument,  but 
not  shrinking  from  plain-spoken  severity  of  con- 
demnation. Never  sparing  himself  labour  when  he 
thought  duty  called,  he  did  not  avail  himself  of  the 
privilege  of  advancing  years  to  leave  the  war  to  be 
carried  on  by  younger  champions. 

It  is  impossible  for  those  who  may  at  times  have 
found  themselves  most  strongly,  and  perhaps  most 
painfully,  opposed  to  him,  not  to  admire  and  revere 
one  who,  through  so  long  a  career  has,  in  what  he 
held  to  be  his  duty  to  the  Church  and  to  religion, 
fought  so  hard,  encountered  such  troubles,  given  up 
so  many  friendships  and  so  much  ease,  and  who, 
while  a  combatant  to  the  last,  undiscouraged  by  odds 
and  sometimes  by  ill-success,  has  brought  to  the  weari- 
ness and  disappointment  of  old  age  an  increasing 
gentleness  and  kindliness  of  spirit,  which  is  one  of 
the  rarest  tokens  and  rewards  of  patient  and  genuine 
self-discipline.  A  man  who  has  set  himself  steadily 
and  undismayed  to  stem  and  bring  to  reason  the  two 
most   powerful   currents   of    conviction    and   feeling 


XXII  RETIREMENT  OF  THE  PROVOST  OF  ORIEL   349 

which  have  agitated  his  times,  leaves  an  impressive 
example  of  zeal  and  fearlessness,  even  to  those 
against  whom  he  has  contended.  What  is  the  upshot 
which  has  come  of  these  efforts,  and  whether  the 
controversies  of  the  moment  have  not  in  his  case,  as 
in  others,  diverted  and  absorbed  faculties  which  might 
have  been  turned  to  calmer  and  more  permanent 
tasks,  we  do  not  inquire. 

Perhaps  a  life  of  combat  never  does  all  that  the 
combatant  thinks  it  ought  to  accomplish,  or  com- 
pensates for  the  sacrifices  it  entails.  In  the  case  of 
the  Provost  of  Oriel,  he  had,  with  all  his  great  and 
noble  qualities,  one  remarkable  want,  which  visibly 
impaired  his  influence  and  his  persuasiveness.  He 
was  out  of  sympathy  with  the  rising  aspirations  and 
tendencies  of  the  time  on  the  two  opposite  sides ;  he 
was  suspicious  and  impatient  of  them.  He  was  so 
sensible  of  their  weak  points,  the  logical  difficulties 
which  they  brought  with  them,  their  precipitate  and 
untested  assumptions,  the  extravagance  and  unsound- 
ness of  character  which  often  seemed  inseparable 
from  them,  that  he  seldom  did  justice  to  them 
viewed  in  their  complete  aspect,  or  was  even  alive 
to  what  was  powerful  and  formidable  in  the  depth, 
the  complexity,  and  the  seriousness  of  the  convictions 
and  enthusiasm  which  carried  them  onwards.  In  truth, 
for  a  man  of  his  singular  activity  and  reach  of  mind, 
he  was  curiously  indifferent  to  much  that  most  in- 
terested his  contemporaries  in  thought  and  literature  ; 
he  did  not  understand  it,  and  he  undervalued  it  as  if 


350   RETIREMENT  OF  THE  TROYOST  OF  ORIEL   xxii 

it   belonged   merely  to   the  passing  fashions  of  the 
hour. 

This  long  career  is  now  over.  Warfare  is  always 
a  rude  trade,  and  men  on  all  sides  who  have  had  to 
engage  in  it  must  feel  at  the  end  how  much  there  is 
to  be  forgiven  and  needing  forgiveness;  how  much 
now  appears  harsh,  unfair,  violent,  which  once 
appeared  only  necessary  and  just.  A  hard  hitter 
like  the  Provost  of  Oriel  must  often  have  left  behind 
the  remembrance  of  his  blows.  But  we  venture  to 
say  that,  even  in  those  who  suffered  from  them,  he 
has  left  remembrances  of  another  and  better  sort. 
He  has  left  the  recollection  of  a  pure,  consistent, 
laborious  life,  elevated  in  its  aim  and  standard,  and 
marked  by  high  public  spirit  and  a  rigid  and  exacting 
sense  of  duty.  In  times  when  it  was  wanted,  he  set 
in  his  position  in  the  University  an  example  of 
modest  and  sober  simplicity  of  living ;  and  no  one 
who  ever  knew  him  can  doubt  the  constant  presence, 
in  all  his  thoughts,  of  the  greatness  of  things  unseen, 
or  his  equally  constant  reference  of  all  that  he  did 
to  the  account  which  he  was  one  day  to  give  at  his 
Lord's  judgment -seat.  We  trust  that  he  may  be 
spared  to  enjoy  the  rest  which  a  weaker  or  less  con- 
scientious man  would  have  claimed  long  ago. 


XXIII 
MARK   PATTISONi 

The  Rector  of  Lincoln,  who  died  at  Harrogate  this 
day  week,  was  a  man  about  whom  judgments  are  more 
than  usually  likely  to  be  biassed  by  prepossessions 
more  or  less  unconscious,  and  only  intelligible  to  the 
mind  of  the  judge.  There  are  those  who  are  in 
danger  of  dealing  with  him  too  severely.  There  are 
also  those  whose  temptation  will  be  to  magnify  and 
possibly  exaggerate  his  gifts  and  acquirements — great 
as  they  undoubtedly  were, — the  use  that  he  made  of 
them,  and  the  place  which  he  filled  among  his  con- 
temporaries. One  set  of  people  finds  it  not  easy  to 
forget  that  he  had  been  at  one  time  closer  than  most 
young  men  of  his  generation  to  the  great  religious 
leaders  whom  they  are  accustomed  to  revere ;  that 
he  was  of  a  nature  fully  to  understand  and  appreciate 
both  their  intellectual  greatness  and  their  moral  and 
spiritual  height ;  that  he  had  shared  to  the  full 
their  ideas  and  hopes ;  that  they,  too,  had  measured 
his  depth  of  character,  and  grasp,  and  breadth,  and 
^  Guardian,  6th  August  1884. 


352  MARK  TATTISON  xxiii 

subtlety  of  mind  ;  and  that  the  keenest  judge  among 
them  of  men  and  of  intellect  had  picked  him  out  as 
one  of  the  most  original  and  powerful  of  a  number  of 
very  able  contemporaries.  Those  who  remember  this 
cannot  easily  pardon  the  lengths  of  dislike  and  bitter- 
ness to  which  in  after  life  Pattison  allowed  himself  to 
be  carried  against  the  cause  which  once  had  his  hearty 
allegiance,  and  in  which,  if  he  had  discovered,  as  he 
thought,  its  mistakes  and  its  weakness,  he  had  once 
recognised  with  all  his  soul  the  nobler  side.  And  on 
the  other  hand,  the  partisans  of  the  opposite  move- 
ment, into  whose  interests  he  so  disastrously,  as  it 
seems  to  us,  and  so  unreservedly  threw  himself, 
naturally  welcomed  and  ^ade  the  most  of  such  an 
accession  to  their  strength,  and  such  an  unquestion- 
able addition  to  their  literary  fame.  To  have  de- 
tached such  a  man  from  the  convictions  which  he 
had  so  professedly  and  so  earnestly  embraced,  and  to 
have  enlisted  him  as  their  determined  and  implacable 
antagonist — to  be  able  to  point  to  him  in  the  maturity 
and  strength  of  his  powers  as  one  who,  having  known 
its  best  aspects,  had  deliberately  despaired  of  religion, 
and  had  turned  against  its  representatives  the  scorn 
and  hatred  of  a  passionate  nature,  whose  fires  burned 
all  the  more  fiercely  under  its  cold  crust  of  reserve 
and  sarcasm — this  was  a  triumph  of  no  common 
order;  and  it  might  conceivably  blind  those  who  could 
rejoice  in  it  to  the  comparative  value  of  qualities 
which,  at  any  rate,  were  very  rare  and  remarkable 
ones. 


XXIII  MARK  PATTISON  353 

Pattison  was  a  man  who,  in  many  ways,  did  not 
do  himself  justice.  As  a  young  man,  his  was  a  severe 
and  unhopeful  mind,  and  the  tendency  to  despond 
was  increased  by  circumstances.  There  was  some- 
thing in  the  quality  of  his  unquestionable  ability  which 
kept  him  for  long  out  of  the  ordinary  prizes  of  an 
Oxford  career;  in  the  class  Hst,  in  the  higher  com- 
petition for  Fellowships,  he  was  not  successful.  There 
are  those  who  long  remembered  the  earnest  pleading 
of  the  Latin  letters  which  it  was  the  custom  to  send 
in  when  a  man  stood  for  a  Fellowship,  and  in  which 
Pattison  set  forth  his  ardent  longing  for  knowledge, 
and  his  narrow  and  unprosperous  condition  as  a  poor 
student.  He  always  came  very  near;  indeed,  he 
more  than  once  won  the  vote  of  the  best  judges  ;  but 
he  just  missed  the  prize.  To  the  bitter  public  dis- 
appointments of  1845  were  added  the  vexations  caused 
by  private  injustice  and  ill-treatment.  He  turned 
fiercely  on  those  who,  as  he  thought,  had  wronged 
him,  and  he  began  to  distrust  men,  and  to  be  on  the 
watch  for  proofs  of  hollowness  and  selfishness  in  the 
world  and  in  the  Church.  Yet  at  this  time,  when 
people  were  hearing  of  his  bitter  and  unsparing  say- 
ings in  Oxford,  he  was  from  time  to  time  preaching 
in  village  churches,  and  preaching  sermons  which 
both  his  educated  and  his  simple  hearers  thought 
unlike  those  of  ordinary  men  in  their  force,  reahty, 
and  earnestness.  But  with  age  and  conflict  the  disposi- 
tion to  harsh  and  merciless  judgments  strengthened 
and  became  characteristic.     This,   however,   should 

VOL.  II  2  A 


354  MARK  TATTISON  xxiii 

be  remembered :  where  he  revered  he  revered  with 
genuine  and  unstinted  reverence;  where  he  saw 
goodness  in  which  he  believed  he  gave  it  ungrudging 
honour.  He  had  real  pleasure  in  recognising  height 
and  purity  of  character,  and  true  intellectual  force, 
and  he  maintained  his  admiration  when  the  course  of 
things  had  placed  wide  intervals  between  him  and 
those  to  whom  it  had  been  given.  His  early  friend- 
ships, where  they  could  be  retained,  he  did  retain 
warmly  and  generously  even  to  the  last ;  he  seemed 
almost  to  draw  a  line  between  them  and  other  things 
in  the  world.  The  truth,  indeed,  was  that  beneath 
that  icy  and  often  cruel  irony  there  was  at  bottom  a 
most  warm  and  affectionate  nature,  yearning  for  sym- 
pathy, longing  for  high  and  worthy  objects,  which, 
from  the  misfortunes  especially  of  his  early  days, 
never  found  room  to  expand  and  unfold  itself.  Let 
him  see  and  feel  that  anything  was  real — character, 
purpose,  cause — and  at  any  rate  it  was  sure  of  his 
respect,  probably  of  his  interest.  But  the  doubt 
whether  it  was  real  was  always  ready  to  present  itself 
to  his  critical  and  suspicious  mind ;  and  these  doubts 
grew  with  his  years. 

People  have  often  not  given  Pattison  credit  for 
the  love  that  was  in  him  for  what  was  good  and  true ; 
it  is  not  to  be  wondered  at,  but  the  observation  has 
to  be  made.  On  the  other  hand,  a  panegyric,  like 
tliat  which  we  reprint  from  the  Times^  sets  too  high 
an  estimate  on  his  intellectual  qualities,  and  on  the 
position  which  they  gave  him.     He  was  full  of  the 


XXIII  MARK  PATTISON  355 

passion  for  knowledge ;  he  was  very  learned,  very 
acute  in  his  judgment  on  what  his  learning  brought 
before  him,  very  versatile,  very  shrewd,  very  subtle  ; 
too  full  of  the  truth  of  his  subject  to  care  about  seem- 
ing to  be  original ;  but,  especially  in  his  poetical 
criticisms,  often  full  of  that  best  kind  of  originality 
which  consists  in  seeing  and  pointing  out  novelty  in 
what  is  most  familiar  and  trite.  But,  not  merely  as 
a  practical  but  as  a  speculative  writer,  he  was  apt  to 
be  too  much  under  the  empire  and  pressure  of  the 
one  idea  which  at  the  moment  occupied  and  interested 
his  mind.  He  could  not  resist  it ;  it  came  to  him 
with  exclusive  and  overmastering  force ;  he  did  not 
care  to  attend  to  what  limited  it  or  conflicted  with  it. 
And  thus,  with  all  the  force  and  sagacity  of  his  Univer- 
sity theories,  they  were  not  always  self- consistent, 
and  they  were  often  one-sided  and  exaggerated.  He 
was  not  a  leader  whom  men  could  follow,  how- 
ever much  they  might  rejoice  at  the  blows  which 
he  might  happen  to  deal,  sometimes  unexpectedly, 
at  things  which  they  disliked.  And  this  holds  of 
more  serious  things  than  even  University  reform  and 
reconstruction. 

And  next,  though  every  competent  reader  must  do 
justice  to  Pattison's  distinction  as  a  man  of  letters, 
as  a  writer  of  English  prose,  and  as  a  critic  of  what  is 
noble  and  excellent  and  what  is  base  and  poor  in 
literature,  there  is  a  curious  want  of  completeness, 
a  frequent  crudity  and  hardness,  a  want,  which  is 
sometimes  a  surprising  want,  of  good  sense  and  good 


356  MARK  PATTISON  xxiii 

taste,  which  form  unwelcome  blemishes  in  his  work, 
and  just  put  it  down  below  the  line  of  first-rate 
excellence  which  it  ought  to  occupy.  Morally,  in 
that  love  of  reality,  and  of  all  that  is  high  and  noble 
in  character,  which  certainly  marked  him,  he  was 
much  better  than  many  suppose,  who  know  only  the 
strength  of  his  animosities  and  the  bitterness  of  his 
sarcasm.  Intellectually,  in  reach,  and  fulness,  and 
solidity  of  mental  power,  it  may  be  doubted  whether 
he  was  so  great  as  it  has  recently  been  the  fashion  to 
rate  him. 


XXIV 

PATTISON'S  ESSAYS^ 

This  is  a  very  interesting  but  a  very  melancholy 
collection  of  papers.  They  are  the  remains  of  the 
work  of  a  man  of  first-rate  intellect,  whose  powers, 
naturally  of  a  high  order,  had  been  diligently  and 
wisely  cultivated,  whose  mind  was  furnished  in  a 
very  rare  degree  with  all  that  reading,  wide  and 
critical,  could  give,  and  which  embraced  in  the  circle 
of  its  interest  all  that  is  important  to  human  life  and 
society.  Mr.  Pattison  had  no  vulgar  standard  of 
what  knowledge  is,  and  what  goodness  is.  He  was 
high,  sincere,  exacting,  even  austere,  in  his  estimates 
of  either;  and  when  he  was  satisfied  he  paid  honour 
with  sometimes  unexpected  frankness  and  warmth. 
But  from  some  unfortunate  element  in  his  tempera- 
ment, or  from  the  effect  upon  it  of  untoward  and 
unkindly  circumstances   at   those  critical   epochs  of 

1  Essays  by  the  late  Mark  Pattison,  soinetinie  Rector  of  Lincoln 
College.  Collected  and  arranged  by  Henry  Nettleship,  M.A., 
Corpus  Professor  of  Latin  in  the  University  of  Oxford.  Guardian, 
ist  May  1889 


358  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  xxiv 

mental  life,  when  character  is  taking  its  bent  for  good 
and  all,  he  was  a  man  in  whose  judgment  severity — 
and  severity  expressing  itself  in  angry  scorn — was 
very  apt  to  outrun  justice.  Longing  for  sympathy 
and  not  ill-fitted  for  it,  capable  of  rare  exertions  in 
helping  those  whom  he  could  help,  he  passed  through 
life  with  a  reputation  for  cynicism  which,  while  he 
certainly  exhibited  it,  he  no  less  certainly  would,  if  he 
had  known  how,  have  escaped  from.  People  could 
easily  tell  what  would  incur  his  dislike  and  opposition, 
what  would  provoke  his  slow,  bitter,  merciless  sarcasm ; 
it  was  never  easy  to  tell  what  would  satisfy  him,  what 
would  attract  his  approval,  when  he  could  be  tempted 
to  see  the  good  side  of  a  thing.  It  must  not  be  for- 
gotten that  he  had  gone  through  a  trial  to  which  few 
men  are  equal.  He  had  passed  from  the  extreme 
ranks  and  the  strong  convictions  of  the  Oxford 
movement — convictions  of  w^hich  the  translation  of 
Aquinas's  Cate7ia  Aurea,  still  printed  in  the  list  of 
his  works,  is  a  memorial — to  the  frankest  form  of 
Liberal  thought.  As  he  himself  writes,  we  cannot 
give  up  early  beliefs,  much  less  the  deep  and  de- 
liberate convictions  of  manhood,  without  some  shock 
to  the  character.  Li  his  case  the  change  certainly 
worked.  It  made  him  hate  what  he  had  left,  and  all 
that  was  like  it,  with  the  bitterness  of  one  who  has 
been  imposed  upon,  and  has  been  led  to  commit 
himself  to  what  he  now  feels  to  be  absurd  and  con- 
temptible, and  the  bitterness  of  this  disappointment 
gave  an  edge  to  all  his  work.     There  seems  through 


XXIV  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  359 

all  his  criticism,  powerful  as  it  is,  a  tone  of  harshness, 
a  readiness  to  take  the  worst  construction,  a  sad  con- 
sciousness of  distrust  and  suspicion  of  all  things 
round  him,  which  greatly  weakens  the  effect  of  his 
judgment.  If  a  man  will  only  look  for  the  worst  side, 
he  will  only  find  the  worst  side ;  but  we  feel  that  we 
act  reasonably  by  not  accepting  such  a  teacher  as  our 
guide,  however  ably  he  may  state  his  case.  There  is 
a  want  of  equitableness  and  fairness  in  his  stern  and 
sometimes  cruel  condemnations ;  and  yet  not  religion 
only,  but  the  wisest  wisdom  of  the  world  tells  of  the 
indispensable  value  of  this  equitableness,  this  old 
Greek  virtue  of  inneiKeia,  in  our  views  of  men  and 
things.  It  is  not  religion  only,  but  common  sense 
which  says  that  "sweetness  and  light,"  kindliness, 
indulgence,  sympathy,  are  necessary  for  moral  and 
spiritual  health.  Scorn,  indignation,  keenly  stinging 
sarcasm,  doubtless  have  their  place  in  a  world  in 
which  untruth  and  baseness  abound  and  flourish  ;  but 
to  live  on  these  is  poison,  at  least  to  oneself. 

These  fierce  antipathies  warped  his  judgment  in 
strange  and  unexpected  ways.  Among  these  papers 
is  a  striking  one  on  Calvin.  If  any  character  in 
history  might  be  expected  to  have  little  attraction  for 
him  it  is  Calvin.  Dogmatist,  persecutor,  tyrant,  the 
proud  and  relentless  fanatic,  who  more  than  any  one 
consecrated  harsh  narrowness  in  rehgion  by  cruel 
theories  about  God,  what  was  there  to  recommend  him 
to  a  lover  of  liberty  who  had  no  patience  for  ecclesi- 
astical pretensions  of  any  kind,  and  who  tells  us  that 


3G0  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  xxiv 

Calvin's  "  sins  against  human  liberty  are  of  the  deepest 
dye  "  ?  For  if  Laud  chastised  his  adversaries  with 
whips,  Calvin  chastised  his  with  scorpions.  Perhaps 
it  is  unreasonable  to  be  suprised,  yet  we  are  taken  by 
surprise,  when  we  find  a  thinker  like  Mr.  Pattison 
drawn  by  strong  sympathy  to  Calvin  and  setting  him 
up  among  the  heroes  and  liberators  of  humanity. 
Mr.  Pattison  is  usually  fair  in  details,  that  is,  he  does 
not  suppress  bad  deeds  or  qualities  in  those  whom  he 
approves,  or  good  deeds  or  qualities  in  those  whom 
he  hates :  it  is  in  his  general  judgments  that  his 
failing  comes  out.  He  makes  no  attempt  to  excuse 
the  notorious  features  of  Calvih's  rule  at  Geneva ;  but 
Mr.  Pattison  reads  into  his  character  a  purpose  and  a 
grandeur  which  place  him  far  above  any  other  man 
of  his  day.  To  recommend  him  to  our  very  different 
ways  of  thinking,  Mr.  Pattison  has  the  courage  to 
allege  that  his  interest  in  dogmatic  theology  was  a 
subordinate  matter,  and  that  the  "  renovation  of 
character,"  the  "moral  purification  of  humanity,'" 
was  the  great  guiding  idea  of  him  who  taught  that 
out  of  the  mass  of  human  kind  only  a  predestined 
remnant  could  possibly  be  saved.  It  is  a  singular 
interpretation  of  the  mind  of  the  author  of  the 
Institutes : — 

The  distinction  of  Calvin  as  a  Reformer  is  not  to  be 
sought  in  the  doctrine  which  now  bears  his  name,  or  in 
any  doctrinal  peculiarity.  His  great  merit  lies  in  his 
comparative  neglect  of  dogma.  He  seized  the  idea  of  re- 
formation as  a  real  rcttovation  of  human  character.     The 


XXIV  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  361 

moral  purification  of  humanity  as  the  original  idea  of 
Christianity  is  the  guiding  idea  of  his  system.  .  .  .  He 
swept  away  at  once  the  sacramental  machinery  of 
material  media  of  salvation  which  the  middle-age  Church 
had  provided  in  such  abundance,  and  which  Luther 
frowned  upon,  but  did  not  reject.  He  was  not  satisfied 
to  go  back  only  to  the  historical  origin  of  Christianity, 
but  would  found  human  virtue  on  the  eternal  antemun- 
dane  will  of  God. 

Again : — 

Calvin  thought  neither  of  fame  or  fortune.  The 
narrowness  of  his  views  and  the  disinterestedness  of  his 
soul  alike  precluded  him  from  regarding  Geneva  as  a 
stage  for  the  gratification  of  personal  ambition.  This 
abegnation  of  self  was  one  great  part  of  his  success. 

And  then  Mr.  Pattison  goes  on  to  describe  in 
detail  how,  governed  and  possessed  by  one  idea,  and 
by  a  theory,  to  oppose  which  was  "moral  depravity," 
he  proceeded  to  estabhsh  his  intolerable  system  of 
discipline,  based  on  dogmatic  grounds — meddlesome, 
inquisitorial,  petty,  cruel — over  the  interior  of  every 
household  in  Geneva.  What  is  there  fascinating,  or 
even  imposing,  in  such  a  character?  It  is  the 
common  case  of  political  and  religious  bigots,  whether 
Jacobin,  or  Puritan,  or  Jesuit,  poor  in  thought  and 
sympathy  and  strong  in  will,  fixing  their  yoke  on  a 
society,  till  the  plague  becomes  unbearable.  He 
seeks  nothing  for  himself  and,  forsooth,  he  makes 
sacrifices.      But   he   gets   what  he   wants,    his   idea 


362  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  xxiv 

carried  out ;  and  self-sacrifice  is  of  what  we  care  for, 
and  not  of  what  we  do  not  care  for.  And  to  keep  up 
this  supposed  character  of  high  moral  purpose,  we 
are  told  of  Calvin's  "comparative  neglect  of  dogma," 
of  his  seizing  the  idea  of  a  "real  reformation  of 
human  character,"  a  "  moral  purification  of  humanity," 
as  the  guiding  idea  of  his  system.  Can  anything  be 
more  unhistorical  than  to  suggest  that  the  father  and 
source  of  all  Western  Puritan  theology  "  neglected 
dogma,"  and  was  more  of  a  moralist  than  a  divine? 
It  is  not  even  true  that  he  "  swept  away  at  once  the 
sacramental  machinery  "  of  mediaeval  and  Lutheran 
teaching ;  Calvin  writes  of  the  Eucharist  in  terms 
which  would  astonish  some  of  his  later  followers. 
But  what  is  the  reason  why  Mr.  Pattison  attributes  to 
the  historical  Calvin  so  much  that  does  not  belong  to 
him,  and,  in  spite  of  so  much  that  repels,  is  yet 
induced  to  credit  him  with  such  great  qualities? 
The  reason  is  to  be  found  in  the  intense  antipathy 
with  which  Mr.  Pattison  regarded  what  he  calls  "  the 
Catholic  reaction  "  over  Europe,  and  in  the  fact  that 
undoubtedly  Calvin's  system  and  influence  was  the 
great  force  which  resisted  both  what  was  bad  and 
false  in  it,  and  also  what  was  good,  true,  generous, 
humane.  Calvinism  opposed  the  "  Catholic  reaction  " 
point-blank,  and  that  was  enough  to  win  sympathy 
for  it,  even  from  Mr.  Pattison. 

The  truth  is  that  what  Popery  is  to  the  average 
Protestant,  and  what  Protestant  heresy  is  to  the 
average  Roman  Catholic,  the  "Catholic  reaction,"  the 


XXIV  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  363 

"Catholic  revival"  in  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth 
centuries  and  in  our  own,  is  to  Mr.  Pattison's  final 
judgment.  It  was  not  only  a  conspiracy  against 
human  liberty,  but  it  brought  with  it  the  degradation 
and  ruin  of  genuine  learning.  It  is  the  all-sufficing 
cause  and  explanation  of  the  mischief  and  evil  doings 
which  he  has  to  set  before  us.  Yet  after  the  violence, 
the  ignorance,  the  injustice,  the  inconsistencies  of 
that  great  ecclesiastical* revolution  which  we  call  by 
the  vague  name  of  Reformation,  a  "Catholic  re- 
action "  was  inevitable.  It  was  not  conceivable  that 
common  sense  and  certain  knowledge  would  submit 
for  ever  to  be  overcrowed  by  the  dogmas  and 
assertions  of  the  new  teachers.  Like  other  powerful 
and  wide  and  strongly  marked  movements,  like  the 
Reformation  which  it  combated,  it  was  a  very  mixed 
thing.  It  produced  some  great  evils  and  led  to 
some  great  crimes.  It  started  that  fatal  religious 
militia,  the  Jesuit  order,  which,  notwithstanding  much 
heroic  self-sacrifice,  has  formed  a  permanent  bar  to 
all  possible  reunion  of  Christendom,  has  fastened  its 
yoke  on  the  Papacy  itself,  and  has  taught  the  Church, 
as  a  systematic  doctrine,  to  put  its  trust  in  the  worst 
expedients  of  human  policy.  The  religious  wars  in 
France  and  Germany,  the  relentless  massacres  of 
the  Low  Countries  and  the  St.  Bartholomew,  the 
consecration  of  treason  and  conspiracy,  were,  without 
doubt,  closely  connected  with  the  "Catholic  reaction." 
But  if  this  great  awakening  and  stimulating  influence 
raised  new  temptations  to  human  passion  and  wicked- 


364  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  xxiv 

ness,  it  was  not  only  in  the  service  of  evil  that  this 
new  zeal  was  displayed.  The  Council  of  Trent, 
whatever  its  faults,  and  it  had  many,  was  itself  a  real 
reformation.  The  "  Catholic  revival  "  meant  the  re- 
kindling of  earnest  religion  and  care  for  a  good  life 
in  thousands  of  souls.  If  it  produced  the  Jesuits,  it 
as  truly  produced  Port  Royal  and  the  Benedictines. 
Europe  would  be  indeed  greatly  the  poorer  if  it 
wanted  some  of  the  most  conspicuous  products  of 
the  Catholic  revival. 

It  is  Mr.  Pattison's  great  misfortune  that  through 
obvious  faults  of  temper  he  has  missed  the  success 
which  naturally  might  have  seemed  assured  to  him, 
of  dealing  with  these  subjects  in  a  large  and  dis- 
passionate way.  Scholar,  thinker,  student  as  he  is, 
conversant  with  all  literature,  familiar  with  books 
and  names  which  many  well-read  persons  have  never 
heard  of,  he  has  his  bitter  prejudices,  like  the  rest  of 
us,  Protestants  or  Catholics;  and  what  he  hates  is 
continually  forcing  itself  into  his  mind.  He  tells, 
with  great  and  pathetic  force,  the  terrible  story  of 
the  judicial  murder  of  Calas  at  Toulouse,  and  of 
Voltaire's  noble  and  successful  efforts  to  bring  the 
truth  to  light,  and  to  repair,  as  far  as  could  be 
repaired,  its  infamous  injustice.  It  is  a  story  which 
shows  to  what  frightful  lengths  fanaticism  may  go  in 
leading  astray  even  the  tribunals  of  justice.  But 
unhappily  the  story  can  be  paralleled  in  all  times  of 
the  world's  history ;  and  though  the  Toulouse  mob 
and  Judges  were  Catholics,  their  wickedness  is  no 


XXIV  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  365 

more  a  proof  against  the  Catholic  revival  than  Titus 
Oates  and  the  George  Gordon  riots  are  against 
Protestantism,  or  the  Jacobin  tribunals  against  Re- 
publican justice.  But  Mr.  Pattison  cannot  conclude 
his  account  without  an  application.  Here  you  have 
an  example  of  what  the  Catholic  revival  does.  It 
first  breaks  Calas  on  the  wheel ;  and  then,  because 
Voltaire  took  up  his  cause,  it  makes  modern  French- 
men, if  they  are  Catholics,  believe  that  Calas  de- 
served it : — 

It  is  part  of  that  general  Catholic  revival  which  has 
been  working  for  some  years,  and  which  like  a  fog  is 
spreading  over  the  face  of  opinion.  .  .  .  The  memory 
of  Calas  had  been  vindicated  by  Voltaire  and  the 
Encyclopedists.  That  was  quite  enough  for  the  Catholics. 
...  It  is  the  characteristic  of  Catholicism  that  it  super- 
sedes reason,  and  prejudges  all  matters  by  the  applica- 
tion of  fixed  principles. 

It  is  no  use  that  M.  Coquerel  flatters  himself  that 
he  has  set  the  matter  at  rest.  He  flatters  himself 
in  vain ;  he  ought  to  know  his  Catholic  countrymen 
better : — 

We  have  little  doubt  that  as  long  as  the  Catholic 
religion  shall  last  their  little  manuals  of  falsified  history 
will  continue  to  repeat  that  Jean  Calas  murdered  his  son 
because  he  had  become  a  convert  to  the  Catholic  faith. 

Are  Httle  manuals  of  falsified  history  confined 
only  to  one  set  of  people?  Is  not  John  Foxe  still 
proof  against  the  assaults  of  Dr.  Maitland?  The 
habit  of  a  priori  judgments  as  to  historical  facts  is,  as 


3C6  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  xxiv 

Mr.  Pattison  truly  says,  *' fatal  to  truth  and  integrity." 
It  is  most  mischievous  when  it  assumes  a  philosophic 
gravity  and  warps  the  criticism  of  a  distinguished 
scholar. 

This  fixed  habit  of  mind  is  the  more  provoking 
because,  putting  aside  the  obtrusive  and  impertinent 
injustice  to  which  it  leads,  Mr.  Pattison's  critical 
work  is  of  so  high  a  character.  His  extensive  and 
accurate  reading,  the  sound  common  sense  with 
which  he  uses  his  reading,  and  the  modesty  and 
absence  of  affectation  and  display  which  seem  to  be 
a  law  of  his  writing,  place  him  very  high.  Perhaps 
he  believes  too  much  in  books  and  learning,  in  the 
power  which  they  exert,  and  what  they  can  do  to 
enable  men  to  reach  the  higher  conquests  of  moral 
and  religious  truth — perhaps  he  forgets,  in  the 
amplitude  of  his  literary  resources,  that  behind  the 
records  of  thought  and  feeling  there  are  the  living 
mind  and  thought  themselves,  still  clothed  with  their 
own  proper  force  and  energy,  and  working  in  defiance 
of  our  attempts  to  classify,  to  judge,  or  to  explain : 
that  there  are  the  real  needs,  the  real  destinies  of 
mankind,  and  the  questions  on  which  they  depend — 
of  which  books  are  a  measure  indeed,  but  an  imperfect 
one.  As  an  instance,  we  might  cite  his  "  Essay  on 
the  Theology  of  Germany  " — elaborate,  learned,  ex- 
travagant in  its  praise  and  in  its  scorn,  full  of  the 
satisfaction  of  a  man  in  possession  of  a  startling  and 
liulc  kn(jwn  subject,  but  with  the  contradictions  of 
a  man   who  in  spite  of  his  theories  believes  more 


XXIV  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  367 

than  his  theories.  But,  as  a  student  who  deals  with 
books  and  what  books  can  teach,  it  is  a  pleasure  to 
follow  him ;  his  work  is  never  slovenly  or  superficial ; 
the  reader  feels  that  he  is  in  the  hands  of  a  man 
who  thoroughly  knows  what  he  is  talking  about,  and 
both  from  conscience  and  from  disposition  is  anxious 
above  all  to  be  accurate  and  discriminative.  If  he 
fails,  as  he  often  seems  to  us  to  do,  in  the  justice 
and  balance  of  his  appreciation  of  the  phenomena 
before  him,  if  his  statements  and  generalisations  are 
crude  and  extravagant,  it  is  that  passion  and  deep 
aversions  have  overpowered  the  natural  accuracy  of 
his  faculty  of  judgment. 

The  feature  which  is  characteristic  in  all  his  work 
is  his  profound  value  for  learning,  the  learning  of 
books,  of  documents,  of  all  literature.  He  is  a 
thinker,  a  clear  and  powerful  one ;  he  is  a  philo- 
sopher, who  has  explored  the  problems  of  abstract 
science  with  intelligence  and  interest,  and  fully 
recognises  their  importance ;  he  has  taken  the 
measure  of  the  political  and  social  questions  which 
the  progress  of  civilisation  has  done  so  little  to  solve; 
he  is  at  home  with  the  whole  range  of  literature, 
keen  and  true  in  observation  and  criticism ;  he  has 
strongly  marked  views  about  education,  and  he  took 
a  leading  part  in  the  great  changes  which  have 
revolutionised  Oxford.  He  is  all  this ;  but  beyond 
and  more  than  all  this  he  is  a  devotee  of  learning,  as 
other  men  are  of  science  or  politics,  deeply  penetrated 
with  its  importance,  keenly  alive  to  the  neglect  of  it, 


3G8  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  xxiv 

full  of  faith  in  the  services  which  it  can  render  to 
mankind,  fiercely  indignant  at  what  degrades,  or 
supplants,  or  enfeebles  it.  Learning,  with  the  severe 
and  bracing  discipline  without  which  it  is  impossible, 
learning  embracing  all  efforts  of  human  intellect — those 
which  are  warning,  beacons  as  well  those  which  have 
elevated  and  enlightened  the  human  mind — is  the 
thing  which  attracts  and  satisfies  him  as  nothing  else 
does ;  not  mere  soulless  erudition,  but  a  great  supply 
and  command  of  varied  facts,  marshalled  and  turned 
to  account  by  an  intelligence  which  knows  their  use. 
The  absence  of  learning,  or  the  danger  to  learning, 
is  the  keynote  of  a  powerful  but  acrid  survey  of  the 
history  and  prospects  of  the  Anglican  Church,  for 
which,  in  spite  of  its  one-sidedness  and  unfairness, 
Churchmen  may  find  not  a  little  which  it  will  be 
useful  to  lay  to  heart.  Dissatisfaction  with  the 
University  system,  in  its  provision  for  the  encourage- 
ment of  learning  and  for  strengthening  and  protecting 
its  higher  interests,  is  the  stimulus  to  his  essay  on 
Oxford  studies,  which  is  animated  with  the  idea  of 
the  University  as  a  true  home  of  real  learning,  and  is 
full  of  the  hopes,  the  animosities,  and,  it  may  be 
added,  the  disappointments  of  a  revolutionary  time. 
He  exults  over  the  destruction  of  the  old  order ;  but 
his  ideal  is  too  high,  he  is  too  shrewd  an  observer, 
too  thorough  and  well-trained  a  judge  of  what  learn- 
ing really  means,  to  be  quite  satisfied  with  the  new. 

The    same    devotion    to    learning    shows    itself 
in   a  feature   of  his  literary   work,   which  is   almost 


XXIV  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  369 

characteristic — the  delight  which  he  takes  in  telling 
the  detailed  story  of  the  life  of  some  of  the  famous 
working  scholars  of  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth 
centuries.  These  men,  whose  names  are  known 
to  the  modern  world  chiefly  in  notes  to  classical 
authors,  or  occasionally  in  some  impertinent  sneer, 
he  likes  to  contemplate  as  if  they  were  alive.  To 
him  they  are  men  with  individual  differences,  each 
with  a  character  and  fortunes  of  his  own,  sharers  to 
the  full  in  the  struggles  and  vicissitudes  of  life.  He 
can  appreciate  their  enormous  learning,  their  un- 
wearied labour,  their  sense  of  honour  in  their  pro- 
fession ;  and  the  editor  of  texts,  the  collator  of 
various  readings  and  emendations,  the  annotator 
who  to  us  perhaps  seems  but  a  learned  pedant 
appears  to  him  as  a  man  of  sound  and  philosophic 
thought,  of  enthusiasm  for  truth  and  light — perhaps 
of  genius — a  man,  too,  with  human  affections  and 
interests,  with  a  history  not  devoid  of  romance. 
There  is  something  touching  in  Mr.  Pattison's  affec- 
tion for  those  old  scholars,  to  whom  the  world  has 
done  scant  justice.  His  own  chief  literary  venture 
was  the  life  of  one  of  the  greatest  of  them,  Isaac 
Casaubon.  We  have  in  these  volumes  sketches,  not 
so  elaborate,  of  several  others,  the  younger  Scaliger, 
Muretus,  Huet,  and  the  great  French  printers,  the 
Stephenses ;  and  in  these  sketches  we  are  also 
introduced  to  a  number  of  their  contemporaries, 
with  characteristic  observations  on  them,  implying 
an  extensive  and  first-hand  knowledge  of  what  they 

VOL.  II  2  B 


370  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  xxiv 

were,  and  an  acquaintance  with  what  was  going  on  in 
the  scholar  world  of  the  day.  The  most  important 
of  these  sketches  is  the  account  of  Justus  Scaliger. 
There  is  first  a  review  article,  very  vigorous  and 
animated.  But  Mr.  Pattison  had  intended  a  com- 
panion volume  to  his  Casaubon ;  and  of  this,  which 
was  never  completed,  we  have  some  fragments,  not 
equal  in  force  and  compactness  to  the  original  sketch. 
But  sketch  and  fragments  together  present  a  very 
vivid  picture  of  this  remarkable  person,  whose  temper 
and  extravagant  vanity  his  biographer  admits,  but 
who  was  undoubtedly  a  marvel  both  of  knowledge 
and  of  the  power  to  use  it,  and  to  whom  we  owe 
the  beginning  of  order  and  system  in  chronology. 
Scaliger  was  to  Mr.  Pattison  the  type  of  the  real 
greatness  of  the  scholar,  a  greatness  not  the  less 
real  that  the  world  could  hardly  understand  it.  He 
certainly  leaves  Scaliger  before  us,  with  his  strange 
ways  of  working,  his  hold  of  the  ancient  languages  as 
if  they  were  mother  tongues,  his  pride  and  slashing 
sarcasm,  and  his  absurd  claim  of  princely  descent, 
with  lineaments  not  soon  forgotten  ;  but  it  is  amusing 
to  meet  once  more,  in  all  seriousness,  Mr.  Pattison's 
bete  noire  of  the  Catholic  reaction,  in  the  quarrels 
between  Scaliger  and  some  shallow  but  clever  and 
scurrilous  Jesuits,  whom  he  had  provoked  by  exposing 
the  False  Decretals  and  the  False  Dionysius,  and 
who  revenged  themselves  by  wounding  him  in  his 
most  sensitive  part,  his  claim  to  descent  from  the 
Princes  of  Verona.     Doubtless  the  religious  difference 


XXIV  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  371 

envenomed  the  dispute,  but  it  did  not  need  the 
"CathoUc  reaction"  to  account  for  such  ignoble 
wrangles  in  those  days. 

These  remains  show  what  a  historian  of  literature 
we  have  lost  in  Mr.  Pattison.  He  was  certainly 
capable  of  doing  much  more  than  the  specimens 
of  work  which  he  has  left  behind ;  but  what  he  has 
left  is  of  high  value.  Wherever  the  disturbing  and 
embittering  elements  are  away,  it  is  hard  to  say  which 
is  the  more  admirable,  the  patient  and  sagacious  way 
in  which  he  has  collected  and  mastered  his  facts,  or 
the  wise  and  careful  judgment  which  he  passes  on 
them.  We  hear  of  people  being  spoilt  by  their  pre- 
possessions, their  party,  their  prejudices,  the  neces- 
sities of  their  political  and  ecclesiastical  position; 
Mr.  Pattison  is  a  warning  that  a  man  may  claim  the 
utmost  independence,  and  yet  be  maimed  in  his 
power  of  being  just  and  reasonable  by  other  things 
than  party.  As  it  is,  he  has  left  us  a  collection  of 
interesting  and  valuable  studies,  disastrously  and 
indelibly  disfigured  by  an  implacable  bitterness,  in 
which  he  but  too  plainly  found  the  greatest  satis- 
faction. 

Mr.  Pattison  used  in  his  later  years  to  give  an 
occasional  lecture  to  a  London  audience.  One  of 
the  latest  was  one  addressed,  we  believe,  to  a  class 
of  working  people  on  poetry,  in  which  he  dwelt  on 
its  heahng  and  consoling  power.  It  was  full  of  Mr. 
Pattison's  clearness  and  directness  of  thought,  and 
made  a  considerable  impression  on  some  who  only 


372  PATTISON'S  ESSAYS  xxiv 

knew  it  from  an  abstract  in  the  newspapers ;  and  it 
was  challenged  by  a  working-man  in  the  Pall  Mall 
Gazette,  who  urged  against  it  with  some  power  the 
argument  of  despair.  Perhaps  the  lecture  was  not 
written  ;  but  if  it  was,  and  our  recollection  of  it  is  at 
all  accurate,  it  was  not  unworthy  of  a  place  in  this 
collection. 


XXV 

■   BISHOP  FRAZER^ 

Every  one  must  be  deeply  touched  by  the  Bishop  of 
Manchester's  sudden,  and,  to  most  of  us,  unexpected 
death  ;  those  not  the  least  who,  unhappily,  found 
themselves  in  opposition  to  him  in  many  important 
matters.  For,  in  spite  of  much  that  many  people 
must  wish  otherwise  in  his  career  as  Bishop,  it  was 
really  a  very  remarkable  one.  Its  leading  motive  was 
high  and  genuine  public  spirit,  and  a  generous  wish  to 
be  in  full  and  frank  sympathy  with  all  the  vast  masses 
of  his  diocese ;  to  put  himself  on  a  level  with  them, 
as  man  with  man,  in  all  their  interests,  to  meet  them 
fearlessly  and  heartily,  to  raise  their  standard  of 
justice  and  large-heartedness  by  showing  them  that 
in  their  life  of  toil  he  shared  the  obligation  and  the 
burden  of  labour,  and  felt  bound  by  his  place  to  be 
as  unsparing  and  unselfish  a  worker  as  any  of  his 

^  Guardian^  28th  October  1885. 


374  BISHOP  FRAZER  xxv 

flock.  Indeed,  he  was  as  original  as  Bishop  Wilber- 
force,  though  in  a  different  direction,  in  introducing 
a  new  type  and  ideal  of  Episcopal  work,  and  a  great 
deal  of  his  ideal  he  realised.  It  is  characteristic  of 
him  that  one  of  his  first  acts  was  to  remove  the 
Episcopal  residence  from  a  mansion  and  park  in  the 
country  to  a  house  in  Manchester.  There  can  be 
no  doubt  that  he  was  thoroughly  in  touch  with  the 
working  classes  in  Lancashire,  in  a  degree  to  which 
no  other  Bishop,  not  even  Bishop  Wilberforce,  had 
reached.  There  was  that  in  the  frankness  and 
boldness  of  his  address  which  disarmed  their  keen 
suspicion  of  a  Bishop's  inevitable  assumption  of 
superiority,  and  put  them  at  their  ease  with  him. 
He  was  always  ready  to  meet  them,  and  to  speak 
off-hand  and  unconventionally,  and  as  they  speak, 
not  always  with  a  due  foresight  of  consequences  or 
qualifications.  If  he  did  sometimes  in  this  way  get 
into  a  scrape,  he  did  not  much  mind  it,  and  they 
liked  him  the  better  for  it.  He  was  perfectly  fearless 
in  his  dealings  with  them ;  in  their  disputes,  in  which 
he  often  was  invited  to  take  a  part,  he  took  the  part 
which  seemed  to  him  the  right  one,  whether  or  not 
it  might  be  the  unpopular  one.  Very  decided,  very 
confident  in  his  opinions  and  the  expression  of  them, 
there  yet  was  apparent  a  curious  and  almost  touching 
consciousness  of  a  deficiency  in  some  of  the  qualities 
—  knowledge,  leisure,  capacity  for  the  deeper  and 
subtler  tasks  of  thought — necessary  to  give  a  strong 
speaker  the  sense  of  being  on  sure  ground.     But  he 


XXV  BISHOP  FRAZER  375 

trusted  to  his  manly  common  sense ;  and  this,  with 
the  populations  with  which  he  had  to  deal,  served 
him  well,  at  least  in  the  main  and  most  characteristic 
part  of  his  work. 

And  for  his  success  in  this  part  of  his  work — in 
making  the  crowds  in  Manchester  feel  that  their 
Bishop  was  a  man  like  themselves,  quite  alive  to 
their  wants  and  claims  and  feelings,  and  not  so 
unlike  them  in  his  broad  and  strong  utterances — his 
Episcopate  deserves  full  recognition  and  honour. 
He  set  an  example  which  we  may  hope  to  see  followed 
and  improved  upon.  But  unfortunately  there  was 
also  a  less  successful  side.  He  was  a  Bishop,  an 
overseer  of  a  flock  of  many  ways  of  life  and  thought, 
a  fellow-worker  with  them,  sympathetic,  laborious, 
warm-hearted.  But  he  was  also  a  Bishop  of  the 
Church  of  Christ,  an  institution  with  its  own  history, 
its  great  truths  to  keep  and  deliver,  its  characteristic 
differences  from  the  world  which  it  is  sent  to  correct 
and  to  raise  to  higher  levels  than  those  of  time  and 
nature.  There  is  no  reason  why  this  side  of  the 
Episcopal  office  should  not  be  joined  to  that  in 
which  Bishop  Frazer  so  signally  excelled.  But  for 
this  part  of  it  he  was  not  well  quahfied,  and  much  in 
his  performance  of  it  must  be  thought  of  with  regret. 
The  great  features  of  Christian  truth  had  deeply 
impressed  him ;  and  to  its  lofty  moral  call  he  re- 
sponded with  conviction  and  earnestness.  But  an 
acquaintance  with  what  he  has  to  interpret  and  guard 
which  may  suffice  for  a  layman  is  not  enough  for  a 


376  BISHOP  FRAZER  xxv 

Bishop  ;  and  knowledge,  the  knowledge  belonging 
to  his  profession,  the  deeper  and  more  varied  know- 
ledge which  makes  a  man  competent  to  speak  as  a 
theologian,  Bishop  Frazer  did  not  possess.  He  rather 
disbelieved  in  it,  and  thought  it  useless,  or,  it  might 
be,  mischievous.  He  resented  its  intrusion  into 
spheres  where  he  could  only  see  the  need  of  the 
simplest  and  least  abstruse  language.  But  facts  are 
not  what  we  may  wish  them,  but  what  they  are ;  and 
questions,  if  they  are  asked,  may  have  to  be  answered, 
with  toil,  it  may  be,  and  difficulty,  like  the  questions, 
assuredly  not  always  capable  of  easy  and  transparent 
statement,  of  mathematical  or  physical  science ;  and 
unless  Christianity  is  a  dream  and  its  history  one 
vast  delusion,  such  facts  and  such  questions  have 
made  what  we  call  theology.  But  to  the  Bishop's 
practical  mind  they  were  without  interest,  and  he 
could  not  see  how  they  could  touch  and  influence 
living  religion.  And  did  not  care  to  know  about 
them ;  he  was  impatient,  and  even  scornful,  when 
stress  was  laid  on  them ;  he  was  intolerant  when  he 
thought  they  competed  with  the  immediate  realities 
of  religion.  And  this  want  of  knowledge  and  of 
respect  for  knowledge  was  a  serious  deficiency.  It 
gave  sometimes  a  tone  of  thoughtless  flippancy  to 
his  otherwise  earnest  language.  And  as  he  was  not 
averse  to  controversy,  or,  at  any  rate,  found  himself 
often  involved  in  it,  he  was  betrayed  sometimes  into 
assertions  and  contradictions  of  the  most  astounding 
inaccuracy,  which  seriously  weakened  his  authority 


XXV  BISHOP  FRAZER  377 

when  he  was  called  upon  to  accept  the  responsibility 
of  exerting  it. 

Partly  for  this  reason,  partly  from  a  certain  vivacity 
of  temper,  he  certainly  showed  himself,  in  spite  of 
his  popular  qualities,  less  equal  than  many  others  of 
his  brethren  to  the  task  of  appeasing  and  assuaging 
religious  strife.  The  difficulties  in  Manchester  were 
not  greater  than  in  other  dioceses ;  there  was  not 
anything  peculiar  in  them ;  there  was  nothing  but 
what  a  patient  and  generous  arbiter,  with  due  know- 
ledge of  the  subject,  might  have  kept  from  breaking 
out  into  perilous  scandals.  Unhappily  he  failed ; 
and  though  he  believed  that  he  had  only  done  his 
duty,  his  failure  was  a  source  of  deep  distress  to 
himself  and  to  others.  But  now  that  he  has  passed 
away,  it  is  but  bare  justice  to  say  that  no  one 
worked  up  more  conscientiously  to  his  own  standard. 
He  gave  himself,  when  he  was  consecrated,  ten 
or  twelve  years  of  work,  and  then  he  hoped  for 
retirement.  He  has  had  fifteen,  and  has  fallen  at 
his  post.  And  to  the  last,  the  qualities  which  gave 
his  character  such  a  charm  in  his  earlier  time  had 
not  disappeared.  There  seemed  to  be  always  some- 
thing of  the  boy  about  him,  in  his  simplicity,  his 
confiding  candour  and  frankness  with  his  friends,  his 
warm-hearted  and  kindly  welcome,  his  mixture  of 
humility  with  a  sense  of  power.  Those  who  can 
remember  him  in  his  younger  days  still  see,  in  spite  of 
all  the  storms  and  troubles  of  his  later  ones,  the  image 
of  the  undergraduate  and  the  young  bachelor,  who 


378  BISHOP  FRAZER  xxv 

years  ago  made  a  start  of  such  brilliant  promise,  and 
who  has  fulfilled  so  much  of  it,  if  not  all.  These  things 
at  any  rate  lasted  to  the  end — his  high  and  exacting 
sense  of  public  duty,  and  his  unchanging  affection 
for  his  old  friends. 


XXVI 

NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"^ 

We  have  not  noticed  before  Dr.  Newman's  Apologia, 
which  has  been  coming  out  lately  in  weekly  numbers, 
because  we  wished,  when  we  spoke  of  it,  to  speak 
of  it  as  a  whole.  The  special  circumstances  out  of 
which  it  arose  may  have  prescribed  the  mode  of  pub- 
lication. It  may  have  been  thought  more  suitable, 
in  point  of  form,  to  answer  a  pamphlet  by  a  series  of 
pamphlets  rather  than  at  once  by  a  set  octavo  of 
several  hundred  pages.  But  the  real  subject  which 
Dr.  Newman  has  been  led  to  handle  is  one  which 
will  continue  to  be  of  the  deepest  interest  long  after 
the  controversy  which  suggested  it  is  forgotten.  The 
real  subject  is  the  part  played  in  the  great  Church 
movement  by  him  who  was  the  leading  mind  in  it ; 
and  it  was  unsatisfactory  to  speak  of  this  till  all  was 
said,  and  we  could  look  on  the  whole  course  described. 
Such  a  subject  might  have  well  excused  a  deliberate 
and  leisurely  volume  to  itself;  perhaps  in  this  way  we 

1  Apologia  fro    Vitti  Sub,.     By  John   Henry  Newman,    D.D. 
Guardian,  22nd  June  1864. 


380  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  xxvi 

should  have  gained,  in  the  laying  out  and  concentra- 
tion of  the  narrative,  and  in  what  helps  to  bring  it  as 
a  whole  before  our  thoughts.  But  a  man's  account 
of  himself  is  never  so  fresh  and  natural  as  when  it  is 
called  out  by  the  spur  and  pressure  of  an  accidental 
and  instant  necessity,  and  is  directed  to  a  purpose 
and  quickened  by  feeHngs  which  belong  to  immediate 
and  passing  circumstances.  The  traces  of  hurried 
work  are  of  light  account  when  they  are  the  guaran- 
tees that  a  man  is  not  sitting  down  to  draw  a  picture 
of  himself,  but  stating  his  case  in  sad  and  deep 
earnest  out  of  the  very  fulness  of  his  heart. 

The  aim  of  the  book  is  to  give  a  minute  and  open 
account  of  the  steps  and  changes  by  which  Dr.  New- 
man passed  from  the  English  Church  to  the  Roman. 
The  history  of  a  change  of  opinion  has  often  been 
written  from  the  most  opposite  points  of  view ;  but  in 
one  respect  this  book  seems  to  stand  alone.  Let  it 
be  remembered  what  it  is,  the  narrative  and  the 
justification  of  a  great  conversion ;  of  a  change  in- 
volving an  entire  reversal  of  views,  judgments,  ap- 
provals, and  condemnations ;  a  change  which,  with 
all  ordinary  men,  involves  a  reversal,  at  least  as  great, 
of  their  sympathies  and  aversions,  of  what  they 
tolerate  and  speak  kindly  of.  Let  it  be  considered 
what  changes  of  feeling  most  changes  of  religion 
compel  and  consecrate;  how  men,  commonly  and 
very  naturally,  look  back  on  what  they  have  left  and 
think  they  have  escaped  from,  with  the  aversion  of  a 
captive  to  his  prison  ;  how  they  usually  exaggerate 


XXVI  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  381 

and  make  absolute  their  divergence  from  what  they 
think  has  betrayed,  fooled,  and  degraded  them ;  how 
easily  they  are  tempted  to  visit  on  it  and  on  those  who 
still  cling  to  it  their  own  mistakes  and  faults.  Let  it 
be  remembered  that  there  was  here  to  be  told  not 
only  the  history  of  a  change,  but  the  history  of  a  deep 
disappointment,  of  the  failure  of  a  great  design,  of 
the  breakdown  of  hopes  the  most  promising  and  the 
most  absorbing;  and  this,  not  in  the  silence  of  a 
man's  study,  but  in  the  fever  and  contention  of  a 
great  struggle  wrought  up  to  the  highest  pitch  of 
passion  and  fierceness,  bringing  with  it  on  all  sides 
and  leaving  behind  it,  when  over,  the  deep  sense  of 
wrong.  It  is  no  history  of  a  mere  intellectual  move- 
ment, or  of  a  passage  from  strong  belief  to  a  weakened 
and  impaired  one,  to  uncertainty,  or  vagueness,  or 
indifference ;' it  is  not  the  account  of  a  change  by  a 
man  who  is  half  sorry  for  his  change,  and  speaks  less 
hostilely  of  what  he  has  left  because  he  feels  less 
friendly  towards  what  he  has  joined.  There  is  no 
reserved  thought  to  be  discerned  in  the  background 
of  disappointment  or  a  wish  to  go  back  again  to 
where  he  once  was.  It  is  a  book  which  describes 
how  a  man,  zealous  and  impatient  for  truth,  thought 
he  had  found  it  in  one  Church,  then  thought  that  his 
finding  was  a  delusion,  and  sought  for  it  and  believed 
he  had  gained  it  in  another.  What  it  shows  us  is 
no  serene  readjustment  of  abstract  doctrines,  but  the 
wreck  and  overturning  of  trust  and  conviction  and 
the  practical  grounds  of  life,  accompanied  with  every- 


382  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  xxvi 

thing  to  provoke,  embitter,  and  exasperate.  It  need 
not  be  said  that  what  Dr.  Newman  holds  he  is  ready  to 
carry  out  to  the  end,  or  that  he  can  speak  severely  of 
men  and  systems. 

Let  all  this  be  remembered,  and  also  that  there  is 
an  opposition  between  what  he  was  and  what  he  is, 
which  is  usually  viewed  as  irreconcilable,  and  which, 
on  the  ordinary  assumptions  about  it,  is  so ;  and  we 
venture  to  say  that  there  is  not  another  instance  to 
be  quoted,  of  the  history  of  a  conversion,  in  which  he 
who  tells  his  conversion  has  so  retained  his  self-pos- 
session, his  temper,  his  mastery  over  his  own  real 
judgment  and  thoughts,  his  ancient  and  legitimate 
sympathies,  his  superiority  to  the  natural  and  inevit- 
able temptations  of  so  altered  a  position ;  which  is 
so  generous  to  what  he  feels  to  be  strong  and  good  in 
what  he  has  nevertheless  abandoned,  so'fearless  about 
letting  his  whole  case  come  out,  so  careless  about 
putting  himself  in  the  right  in  detail;  which  is  so 
calm,  and  kindly,  and  measured,  with  such  a  quiet 
effortless  freedom  from  the  stings  of  old  conflicts, 
which  bears  so  few  traces  of  that  bitterness  and 
antipathy  which  generally  —  and  we  need  hardly 
wonder  at  it — follows  the  decisive  breaking  with  that 
on  which  a  man's  heart  was  stayed,  and  for  which  he 
would  once  have  died. 

There  is  another  thing  to  be  said,  and  we  venture 
to  say  it  out  plainly,  because  Dr.  Newman  himself 
has  shown  that  he  knows  quite  well  what  he  has  been 
doing.     While  he  has  written  what  will  command  the 


XXVI  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  383 

sympathy  and  the  reverence  of  every  one,  however 
irreconcilably  opposed  to  him,  to  whom  a  great  and 
noble  aim  and  the  trials  of  a  desperate  and  self-sacri- 
ficing struggle  to  compass  it  are  objects  of  admiration 
and  honour,  it  is  undeniable  that  ill-nature  or  vindic- 
tiveness  or  stupidity  will  find  ample  materials  of  his 
own  providing  to  turn  against  him.  Those  who  know 
Dr.  Newman's  powers  and  are  acquainted  with  his 
career,  and  know  to  what  it  led  him,  and  yet  persist 
in  the  charge  of  insincerity  and  dishonesty  against 
one  who  probably  has  made  the  greatest  sacrifice 
of  our  generation  to  his  convictions  of  truth,  will 
be  able  to  pick  up  from  his  own  narrative  much 
that  they  would  not  otherwise  have  known,  to  confirm 
and  point  the  old  familiar  views  cherished  by  dislike 
or  narrowness.  This  is  inevitable  when  a  man  takes 
the  resolution  of  laying  himself  open  so  unreservedly, 
and  with  so  little  care  as  to  what  his  readers  think  of 
what  he  tells  them,  so  that  they  will  be  persuaded 
that  he  was  ever,  even  from  his  boyhood,  deeply  con- 
scious of  the  part  which  he  was  performing  in  the 
sight  of  his  Maker.  Those  who  smile  at  the  belief  of 
a  deep  and  religious  mind  in  the  mysterious  interven- 
tions and  indications  of  Providence  in  the  guidance 
of  human  life,  will  open  their  eyes  at  the  feeling 
which  leads  him  to  tell  the  story  of  his  earliest  recol- 
lections of  Roman  Catholic  peculiarities,  and  of  the 
cross  imprinted  on  his  exercise -book.  Those  who 
think  that  everything  about  religion  and  their  own 
view  of  religion  is  such  plain  sailing,  so  palpable  and 


384  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  xxvi 

manifest,  that  all  who  are  not  fools  or  knaves  must 
be  of  their  own  opinion,  will  find  plenty  to  wonder  at 
in  the  confessions  of  awful  perplexity  which  equally 
before  and  after  his  change  Dr.  Newman  makes. 
Those  who  have  never  doubted,  who  can  no  more 
imagine  the  practical  difficulties  accompanying  a  great 
change  of  belief  than  they  can  imagine  a  change  of 
belief  itself,  will  meet  with  much  that  to  them  will 
seem  beyond  pardon,  in  the  actual  events  of  a  change, 
involving  such  issues  and  such  interests,  made  so  de- 
Hberately  and  cautiously,  with  such  hesitation  and 
reluctance,  and  in  so  long  a  time ;  they  will  be  able  to 
point  to  many  moments  in  it  when  it  will  be  easy  to 
say  that  more  or  less  ought  to  have  been  said,  more 
or  less  ought  to  have  been  done.  Much  more  will 
those  who  are  on  the  side  of  doubt,  who  acquiesce  in, 
or  who  desire  the  overthrow  of  existing  hopes  and 
beliefs,  rejoice  in  such  a  frank  avowal  of  the  difficul- 
ties of  religion  and  the  perplexities  of  so  earnest  a 
believer,  and  make  much  of  their  having  driven  such 
a  man  to  an  alternative  so  obnoxious  and  so  monstrous 
to  most  Englishmen.  It  is  a  book  full  of  minor 
premisses,  to  which  many  opposite  majors  will  be 
fitted.  But  whatever  may  be  thought  of  many  details, 
the  effect  and  lesson  of  the  whole  will  not  be  lost  on 
minds  of  any  generosity,  on  whatever  side  they  may 
be  ;  they  will  be  touched  with  the  confiding  nobleness 
which  has  kept  back  nothing,  which  has  stated  its 
case  with  its  weak  points  and  its  strong,  and  with  full 
consciousness  of  what  was  weak  as  well  as  of  what 


XXVI  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  385 

was  strong,  which  has  surrendered  its  whole  course 
of  conduct,  just  as  it  has  been,  to  be  scrutinised, 
canvassed,  and  judged.  What  we  carry  away  from 
following  such  a  history  is  something  far  higher  and 
more  solemn  than  any  controversial  inferences  ;  and 
it  seems  almost  like  a  desecration  to  make,  as  we 
say,  capital  out  of  it,  to  strengthen  mere  argument,  to 
confirm  a  theory,  or  to  damage  an  opponent. 

The  truth,  in  fact,  is,  that  the  interest  is  personal 
much  more  than  controversial.  Those  who  read  it  as 
a  whole,  and  try  to  grasp  the  effect  of  all  its  portions 
compared  together  and  gathered  into  one,  will,  it 
seems  to  us,  find  it  hard  to  bend  into  a  decisive 
triumph  for  any  of  the  great  antagonist  systems  which 
appear  in  collision.  There  can  be  no  doubt  of  the 
perfect  conviction  with  which  Dr.  Newman  has  taken 
his  side  for  good.  But  while  he  states  the  effect  of 
arguments  on  his  own  mind,  he  leaves  the  arguments 
in  themselves  as  they  were,  and  touches  on  them,  not 
for  the  sake  of  what  they  are  worth,  but  to  explain 
the  movements  and  events  of  his  own  course.  Not 
from  any  studied  impartiality,  which  is  foreign  to  his 
character,  but  from  his  strong  and  keen  sense  of  what 
is  real  and  his  determined  efforts  to  bring  it  out,  he 
avoids  the  temptation — as  it  seems  to  us,  who  still 
believe  that  he  was  more  right  once  than  he  is  now — 
to  do  injustice  to  his  former  self  and  his  former 
position.  At  any  rate,  the  arguments  to  be  drawn 
from  this  narrative,  for  or  against  England,  or  for  or 
against  Rome,  seem  to  us  very  evenly  balanced.     Of 

VOL.  II  2  C 


386  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  xxvi 

course,  such  a  history  has  its  moral.  But  the  moral 
is  not  the  ordinary  vulgar  one  of  the  history  of  a 
religious  change.  It  is  not  the  supplement  or  disguise 
of  a  polemical  argument.  It  is  the  deep  want  and 
necessity  in  our  age  of  the  Church,  even  to  the  most 
intensely  religious  and  devoted  minds,  of  a  sound  and 
secure  intellectual  basis  for  the  faith  which  they  value 
more  than  life  and  all  things.  We  hope  that  we  are 
strong  enough  to  afford  to  judge  fairly  of  such  a 
spectacle,  and  to  lay  to  heart  its  warnings,  even 
though  the  particular  results  seem  to  go  against  what 
we  think  most  right.  It  is  a  mortification  and  a  trial 
to  the  English  Church  to  have  seen  her  finest  mind 
carried  away  and  lost  to  her,  but  it  is  a  mortification 
which  more  confident  and  peremptory  systems  than 
hers  have  had  to  undergo ;  the  parting  was  not 
without  its  compensations  if  only  that  it  brought 
home  so  keenly  to  many  the  awfulness  and  the 
seriousness  of  truth ;  and  surely  never  did  any  man 
break  so  utterly  with  a  Church,  who  left  so  many 
sympathies  behind  him  and  took  so  many  with  him, 
who  continued  to  feel  so  kindly  and  with  such  large- 
hearted  justice  to  those  from  whom  his  changed  posi- 
tion separated  him  in  this  world  for  ever. 

The  Apologia  is  the  history  of  a  great  battle  against 
Liberalism,  understanding  by  Liberalism  the  tenden- 
cies of  modern  thought  to  destroy  the  basis  of  re- 
vealed religion,  and  ultimately  of  all  that  can  be 
called  religion  at  all.  The  question  which  he  pro- 
fessedly addresses  himself  to  set  at  rest,  that  of  his 


XXVI  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  387 

honesty,  is  comparatively  of  slight  concern  to  those 
vv^ho  knew  him,  except  so  far  that  they  must  be  in- 
terested that  others,  who  did  not  know  him,  should 
not  be  led  to  do  a  revolting  injustice.  The  real 
interest  is  to  see  how  one  who  felt  so  keenly  the 
claims  both  of  what  is  new  and  what  is  old,  who, 
with  such  deep  and  unusual  love  and  trust  for  anti- 
quity, took  in  with  quick  sympathy,  and  in  its  most 
subtle  and  most  redoubtable  shapes,  the  intellectual 
movement  of  modern  times,  could  continue  to  feel 
the  force  of  both,  and  how  he  would  attempt  to  har- 
monise them.  Two  things  are  prominent  in  the 
whole  history.  One  is  the  fact  of  religion,  early  and 
deeply  implanted  in  the  writer's  mind,  absorbing  and 
governing  it  without  rival  throughout.  He  speaks  of 
an  "inward  conversion"  at  the  age  of  fifteen,  "of 
which  I  was  conscious,  and  of  which  I  am  still  more 
certain  than  that  I  have  hands  and  feet."  It  was  the 
religion  of  dogma  and  of  a  definite  creed  which 
made  him  "rest  in  the  thought  of  two,  and  two  only, 
supreme  and  luminously  self-evident  beings,  myself 
and  my  Creator  " — which  completed  itself  with  the 
idea  of  a  visible  Church  and  its  sacramental  system. 
Religion,  in  this  aspect  of  it,  runs  unchanged  from 
end  to  end  of  the  scene  of  change  : — 

I  have  changed  in  many  things  ;  in  this  I  have  not. 
From  the  age  of  fifteen  dogma  has  been  the  fundamental 
principle  of  my  religion  ;  I  know  no  other  religion.  I 
cannot  enter  into  the  idea  of  any  other  sort  of  religion  ; 
religion,  as  a  mere  sentiment,  is  to  me  a  dream  and  a 


388  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  xxvi 

mockery.  As  well  can  there  be  filial  love  without  the 
fact  of  a  father,  as  devotion  without  the  fact  of  a  Supreme 
Being.  What  I  held  in  1816  I  held  in  1833,  and  I 
hold  in  1864.  Please  God  I  shall  hold  it  to  the  end. 
Even  when  I  was  under  Dr.  Whately's  influence  I  had 
no  temptation  to  be  less  zealous  for  the  dogmas  of  the 
faith. 

The  other  thing  is  the  haunting  necessity,  in  an 
age  of  thought  and  innovation,  of  a  philosophy  of 
religion,  equally  deep,  equally  comprehensive  and 
thorough,  with  the  invading  powers  which  it  was 
wanted  to  counteract ;  a  philosophy,  not  on  paper  or 
in  theory,  but  answering  to  and  vouched  for  by  the 
facts  of  real  life.  In  the  English  Church  he  found, 
we  think  that  we  may  venture  to  say,  the  religion 
which  to  him  was  life,  but  not  the  philosophy  which 
he  wanted.  The  Apologia  is  the  narrative  of  his 
search  for"  it.  Two  strongly  marked  lines  of  thought 
are  traceable  all  through,  one  modern  in  its  scope 
and  sphere,  the  other  ancient.  The  leading  subject 
of  his  modern  thought  is  the  contest  with  liberal 
unbelief;  contrasted  with  this  was  his  strong  interest 
in  Christian  antiquity,  his  deep  attachment  to  the 
creed,  the  history,  and  the  moral  temper  of  the  early 
Church.  The  one  line  of  thought  made  him,  and 
even  now  makes  him,  sympathise  with  Anglicanism, 
which  is  in  the  same  boat  with  him,  holds  the  same 
principle  of  the  unity  and  continuity  of  revealed  truth, 
and  is  doing  the  same  work,  though,  as  he  came  to 
think  in  the  end,  feebly  and  hopelessly.     The  other, 


XXVI  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  389 

more  and  more,  carried  him  away  from  Anglicanism  ; 
and  the  contrast  and  opposition  between  it  and  the 
ancient  Church,  in  organisation,  in  usage,  and  in  that 
general  tone  of  feeling  which  quickens  and  gives 
significance  and  expression  to  forms,  overpowered 
more  and  more  the  sense  of  affinity,  derived  from  the 
identity  of  creeds  and  sacraments  and  leading  points 
of  Church  polity,  and  from  the  success  with  which 
the  best  and  greatest  Anglican  writers  had  appro- 
priated and  assimilated  the  theology  of  the  Fathers. 
But  though  he  urges  the  force  of  ecclesiastical  pre- 
cedents in  a  starthng  way,  as  in  the  account  which  he 
gives  of  the  effect  of  the  history  of  the  Monophysites 
on  his  view  of  the  tenableness  of  the  Anglican  theory, 
absolutely  putting  out  of  consideration  the  enormous 
difference  of  circumstances  between  the  cases  which 
are  compared,  and  giving  the  instance  in  question  a 
force  and  importance  which  seem  to  be  in  singular 
contrast  with  the  general  breadth  and  largeness  of 
his  reasoning,  it  was  not  the  halting  of  an  ecclesias- 
tical theory  which  dissatisfied  him  with  the  English 
Church. 

Anglicanism  was  not  daring  enough  for  him.  With 
his  ideas  of  the  coming  dangers  and  conflicts,  he 
wanted  something  bold  and  thoroughgoing,  wide- 
reaching  in  its  aims,  resolute  in  its  language,  claiming 
and  venturing  much.  Anglicanism  was  not  that.  It 
had  given  up  as  impracticable  much  that  the  Church 
had  once  attempted.  It  did  not  pretend  to  rise  so 
high,  to  answer  such  great  questions,  to  lay  down 


390  NEWMAN'S  "ArOLOGlA"  xxvi 

such  precise  definitions.  Wisely  modest,  or  timidly 
uncertain — mindful  of  the  unalterable  limits  of  our 
human  condition,  we  say;  forgetful,  he  thought,  or 
doubting,  or  distrustful,  of  the  gifts  and  promises  of 
a  supernatural  dispensation — it  certainly  gave  no  such 
complete  and  decisive  account  of  the  condition  and 
difficulties  of  religion  and  the  world,  as  had  been  done 
once,  and  as  there  were  some  who  did  still.  There 
were  problems  which  it  did  not  profess  to  solve ; 
there  were  assertions  which  others  boldly  risked,  and 
which  it  shrunk  from  making;  there  were  demands 
which  it  ventured  not  to  put  forward.  Again,  it  was 
not  refined  enough  for  him ;  it  had  Httle  taste  for 
the  higher  forms  of  the  saintly  ideal ;  it  wanted  the 
austere  and  high-strung  virtues;  it  was  contented, 
for  the  most  part,  with  the  domestic  type  of  excel- 
lence, in  which  goodness  merged  itself  in  the  interests 
and  business  of  the  common  world,  and,  working  in 
them,  took  no  care  to  disengage  itself  or  mark  itself 
off,  as  something  distinct  from  them  and  above  them. 
Above  all,  Anglicanism  was  too  limited ;  it  was 
local,  insular,  national ;  its  theory  was  made  for  its 
special  circumstances ;  and  he  describes  in  a  remark- 
able passage  how,  in  contrast  with  this,  there  rung  in 
his  ears  continually  the  proud  self-assertion  of  the 
other  side,  Seciims  judicnt  orbis  terrariim.  What  he 
wanted,  what  it  was  the  aim  of  his  life  to  find,  was  a 
great  and  effective  engine  against  Liberalism ;  for 
years  he  tried,  with  eager  but  failing  hope,  to  find  it 
in  the  theology  and  working  of  the  English  Church ; 


XXVI  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  391 

when  he  made  up  his  mind  that  Anglicanism  was 
not  strong  enough  for  the  task,  he  left  it  for  a  system 
which  had  one  strong  power;  which  claimed  to  be 
able  to  shut  up  dangerous  thought. 

Very  sorrowful,  indeed,  is  the  history,  told  so 
openly,  so  simply,  so  touchingly,  of  the  once  promis- 
ing advance,  of  the  great  breakdown.  And  yet,  to 
those  who  still  cling  to  what  he  left,  regret  is  not  the 
only  feehng.  For  he  has  the  nobleness  and  the 
generosity  to  say  what  he  did  find  in  the  English 
Church,  as  well  as  what  he  did  not  find.  He  has 
given  her  up  for  good,  but  he  tells  and  he  shows, 
with  no  grudging  frankness,  what  are  the  fruits  of  her 
discipline.  "So  I  went  on  for  years,  up  to  1841.  It 
was,  in  a  human  point  of  view,  the  happiest  time  of 
my  life.  ...  I  did  not  suppose  that  such  sunshine 
would  last,  though  I  knew  not  what  would  be  its 
termination.  It  was  the  time  of  plenty,  and  during 
its  seven  years  I  tried  to  lay  up  as  much  as  I  could 
for  the  dearth  which  was  to  follow  it."  He  explains 
and  defends  what  to  us  seem  the  fatal  marks  against 
Rome  j  but  he  lets  us  see  with  what  force,  and  for 
how  long,  they  kept  alive  his  own  resistance  to  an 
attraction  which  to  him  was  so  overwhelming.  And 
he  is  at  no  pains  to  conceal — it  seems  even  to  console 
him  to  show — what  a  pang  and  wrench  it  cost  him 
to  break  from  that  home  under  whose  shadow  his 
spiritual  growth  had  increased.  He  has  condemned 
us  unreservedly ;  but  there  must,  at  any  rate,  be  some 
wonderful  power  and  charm   about   that  which  he 


392  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  xxvi 

loved  with  a  love  which  is  not  yet  extinguished ;  else 
how  could  he  write  of  the  past  as  he  does  ?  He  has 
shown  that  he  can  understand,  though  he  is  unable  to 
approve,  that  others  should  feel  that  power  still. 

Dr.  Newman  has  stated,  w^ith  his  accustomed  force 
and  philosophical  refinement,  what  he  considers  the 
true  idea  of  that  infallibility,  which  he  looks  upon  as 
the  only  power  in  the  world  which  can  make  head 
against  and  balance  Liberalism — which  "can  with- 
stand and  baffle  the  fierce  energy  of  passion,  and  the 
all-corroding,  all-dissolving  scepticism  of  the  intellect 
in  religious  inquiries;"  which  he  considers  "as  a 
provision,  adapted  by  the  mercy  of  the  Creator,  to 
preserve  religion  in  the  world,  and  to  restrain  that 
freedom  of  thought  which  is  one  of  the  greatest  of 
our  natural  gifts,  from  its  own  suicidal  excesses." 
He  says,  as  indeed  is  true,  that  it  is  "  a  tremendous 
power,"  though  he  argues  that,  in  fact,  its  use  is 
most  wisely  and  beneficially  limited.  And  doubtless, 
whatever  the  difficulty  of  its  proof  may  be,  and  to  us 
this  proof  seems  simply  beyond  possibility,  it  is  no 
mere  power  upon  paper.  It  acts  and  leaves  its  mark ; 
it  binds  fast  and  overthrows  for  good.  But  when, 
put  at  its  highest,  it  is  confronted  with  the  "giant 
evil "  which  it  is  supposed  to  be  sent  into  the  world 
to  repel,  we  can  only  say  that,  to  a  looker-on,  its 
failure  seems  as  manifest  as  the  existence  of  the 
claim  to  use  it.  It  no  more  does  its  work,  in  the 
sense  of  succeeding  and  triumphing,  than  the  less 
magnificent    "  Establishments "   do.      It  keeps  some 


XXVI  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  393 

check — it  fails  on  a  large  scale  and  against  the  real 
strain  and  pinch  of  the  mischief;  and  they,  too,  keep 
so7iie  check,  and  are  not  more  fairly  beaten  than  it  is, 
in  "  making  a  stand  against  the  wild  living  intellect  of 
man." 

Without  infallibility,  it  is  said,  men  will  turn  free- 
thinkers and  heretics ;  but  don't  they,  with  it  ?  and 
what  is  the  good  of  the  engine  if  it  will  not  do  its 
work  ?  And  if  it  is  said  that  this  is  the  fault  of  human 
nature,  which  resists  what  provokes  and  checks  it, 
still  that  very  thing,  which  infallibility  was  intended 
to  counteract,  goes  on  equally,  whether  it  comes  into 
play  or  not.  Meanwhile,  truth  does  stay  in  the  world, 
the  truth  that  there  has  been  among  us  a  Divine 
Person,  of  whom  the  Church  throughout  Christendom 
is  the  representative,  memorial,  and  the  repeater  of 
His  message ;  doubtless,  the  means  of  knowledge  are 
really  guarded ;  yet  we  seem  to  receive  that  message 
as  we  receive  the  witness  of  moral  truth;  and  it 
would  not  be  contrary  to  the  analogy  of  things  here 
if  we  had  often  got  to  it  at  last  through  mistakes. 
But  when  it  is  reached,  there  it  is,  strong  in  its 
own  power;  and  it  is  difficult  to  think  that  if 
it  is  not  strong  enough  in  itself  to  stand,  it  can 
be  protected  by  a  claim  of  infaUibility.  A  future, 
of  which  infallibility  is  the  only  hope  and  safe- 
guard, seems  to  us  indeed  a  prospect  of  the  deepest 
gloom. 

Dr.  Newman,  in  a  very  remarkable  passage,  de- 
scribes the  look  and  attitude  of  invading  LiberaHsm, 


304  Newman's  "apologia"  xxvi 

and  tells  us  why  he  is  not  forward  in  the  conflict. 
*'  It  seemed  to  be  a  time  of  all  others  in  which  Chris- 
tians had  a  call  to  be  patient,  in  which  they  had  no 
other  way  of  helping  those  who  were  alarmed  than 
that  of  exhorting  them  to  have  a  little  faith  and  forti- 
tude, and  *  to  beware,'  as  the  poet  says,  '  of  dangerous 
steps.'"  And  he  interprets  "recent  acts  of  the 
highest  Catholic  authority  "  as  meaning  that  there  is 
nothing  to  do  just  now  but  to  sit  still  and  trust. 
Well ;  but  the  Christian  Year  will  do  that  much 
for  us,  just  as  well. 

People  who  talk  glibly  of  the  fearless  pursuit  of 
truth  may  here  see  a  real  example  of  a  life  given  to 
it — an  example  all  the  more  solemn  and  impres- 
sive if  they  think  that  the  pursuit  was  in  vain. 
It  is  easy  to  declaim  about  it,  and  to  be  eloquent 
about  lies  and  sophistries ;  but  it  is  shallow  to 
forget  that  truth  has  its  difficulties.  To  hear  some 
people  talk,  it  might  be  thought  that  truth  was 
a  thing  to  be  made  out  and  expressed  at  will, 
under  any  circumstances,  at  any  time,  amid  any 
complexities  of  facts  or  principles,  by  half  an  hour's 
choosing  to  be  attentive,  candid,  logical,  and  resolute ; 
as  if  there  was  not  a  chance  of  losing  what  perhaps 
you  have,  as  well  as  of  gaining  what  you  think  you 
need.  If  they  would  look  about  them,  if  they  would 
look  into  themselves,  they  would  recognise  that  Truth 
is  an  awful  and  formidable  goddess  to  all  men  and  to 
all  systems;  that  all  have  their  weak  points  where 
virtually,  more  or  less  consciously,  more  or  less  dex- 


XXVI  KEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  395 

terously,  they  shrink  from  meeting  her  eye ;  that 
even  when  we  make  sacrifice  of  everything  for  her 
sake,  we  find  that  she  still  encounters  us  with  claims, 
seemingly  inconsistent  with  all  that  she  has  forced  us 
to  embrace — with  appearances  which  not  only  con- 
vict us  of  mistake,  but  seem  to  oblige  us  to  be  tolerant 
of  what  we  cannot  really  assent  to. 

She  gives  herself  freely  to  the  earnest  and  true- 
hearted  inquirer ;  but  to  those  who  presume  on  the 
easiness  of  her  service,  she  has  a  side  of  strong  irony. 
You  common-sense  men,  she  seems  to  say,  who  see 
no  difficulties  in  the  world,  you  little  know  on  what 
shaky  ground  you  stand,  and  how  easily  you  might 
be  reduced  to  absurdity.  You  critical  and  logical 
intellects,  who  silence  all  comers  and  cannot  be 
answered,  and  can  show  everybody  to  be  in  the  wrong 
— into  what  monstrous  and  manifest  paradoxes  are  you 
not  betrayed,  blind  to  the  humble  facts  which  upset 
your  generalisations,  not  even  seeing  that  dulness 
itself  can  pronounce  you  mistaken  ! 

In  the  presence  of  such  a  narrative  as  this,  sober 
men  will  think  more  seriously  than  ever  about  charg- 
ing their  most  extreme  opponents  with  dishonesty 
and  disregard  to  truth. 

As  we  said  before,  this  history  seems  to  us  to  leave 
the  theological  question  just  where  it  was.  The 
objections  to  Rome,  which  Dr.  Newman  felt  so 
strongly  once,  but  which  yielded  to  other  considera- 
tions, we  feel  as  strongly  still.  The  substantial  points 
of  the  English  theory,  which  broke  down  to  his  mind. 


396  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  xxvi 

seem  to  us  as  substantial  and  trustworthy  as  before. 
He  failed,  but  we  believe  that,  in  spite  of  everything, 
England  is  the  better  for  his  having  made  his  trial. 
Even  Liberalism  owes  to  the  movement  of  which  he 
was  the  soul  much  of  what  makes  it  now  such  a  con- 
trast, in  largeness  of  mind  and  warmth,  to  the  dry, 
repulsive,  narrow,  material  Liberalism  of  the  Reform 
era.  He,  and  he  mainly,  has  been  the  source,  often 
unrecognised  and  unsuspected,  of  depth  and  richness 
and  beauty,  and  the  strong  passion  for  what  is  genuine 
and  real,  in  our  religious  teaching.  Other  men, 
other  preachers,  have  taken  up  his  thoughts  and 
decked  them  out,  and  had  the  credit  of  being  greater 
than  their  master. 

In  looking  back  on  the  various  turns  and  vicissi- 
tudes of  his  English  course,  we,  who  inherit  the  fruits 
of  that  glorious  failure,  should  speak  respectfully  and 
considerately  where  we  do  not  agree  with  him,  and 
with  deep  gratitude — all  the  more  that  now  so  much 
lies  between  us — where  we  do.  But  the  review  makes 
us  feel  more  than  ever  that  the  English  Church, 
whose  sturdy  strength  he  underrated,  and  whose  ir- 
regular theories  provoked  him,  was  fully  worthy  of  the 
interest  and  the  labours  of  the  leader  who  despaired 
of  her.  Anglicanism  has  so  far  outlived  its  revolu- 
tions, early  and  late  ones,  has  marched  on  in  a 
distinct  path,  has  developed  a  theology,  has  consoli- 
dated an  organisation,  has  formed  a  character  and 
tone,  has  been  the  organ  of  a  living  spirit.  The 
"magnetic  storms"  of  thought  which  sweep  over  the 


XXVI  NEWMAN'S  "APOLOGIA"  397 

world  may  be  destructive  and  dangerous  to  it,  as 
much  as,  but  not  more  than,  to  other  bodies  which 
claim  to  be  Churches  and  to  represent  the  message 
of  God.  But  there  is  nothing  to  make  us  think  that, 
in  the  trials  which  may  be  in  store,  the  English  Church 
will  fail  while  others  hold  their  own. 


XXVII 

DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "^ 

Dr.  Pusey's  Appeal  has  received  more  than  one 
answer.  These  answers,  from  the  Roman  Catholic 
side,  are — what  it  was  plain  that  they  would  be — 
assurances  to  him  that  he  looks  at  the  question  from 
an  entirely  mistaken  point  of  view ;  that  it  is,  of  course, 
very  right  and  good  of  him  to  wish  for  peace  and  union, 
but  that  there  is  only  one  way  of  peace  and  union — 
unconditional  submission.  He  may  have  peace  and 
union  for  himself  at  any  moment,  if  he  will ;  so  may 
the  English  Church,  or  the  Greek  Church,  or  any  other 
religious  body,  organised  or  unorganised. 

The  way  is  always  open  ;  there  is  no  need  to  write 
long  books  or  make  elaborate  proposals  about  union. 
Union  means  becoming  Catholic ;  becoming  Catholic 
means  acknowledging  the  exclusive  claims  of  the  Pope 
or  the  Roman  Church.  In  the  long  controversy  one 
party  has  never  for  an  instant  wavered  in  the  assertion 
that  it  could  not,  and  never  would,  be  in  the  wrong. 
The  way  to  close  the  controversy,  and  the  only  one, 
^   The  Times,  31st  March  1866. 


xxvn      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"      399 

is  to  admit  that  Dr.  Pusey  shall  have  any  amount  of 
assurance  and  proof  that  the  Roman  position  and 
Roman  doctrine  and  practice  are  the  right  ones. 

His  misapprehensions  shall  be  corrected ;  his 
ignorance  of  what  is  Roman  theology  fully,  and  at 
any  length,  enlightened.  There  is  no  desire  to 
shrink  from  the  fullest  and  most  patient  argument 
in  its  favour,  and  he  may  call  it,  if  he  likes,  ex- 
planation. But  there  is  only  one  practical  issue  to 
what  he  has  proposed — not  to  stand  bargaining  for 
impossible  conditions,  but  thankfully  and  humbly 
to  join  himself  to  the  true  Church  while  he  may.  It 
is  only  the  way  in  which  the  answer  is  given  that 
varies.  Here  characteristic  differences  appear.  The 
authorities  of  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  swell  out 
to  increased  magnificence,  and  nothing  can  exceed 
the  suavity  and  the  compassionate  scorn  with  which 
they  point  out  the  transparent  absurdity  and  the 
audacity  of  such  proposals.  The  Holy  Of^ce  at 
Rome  has  not,  it  may  be,  yet  heard  of  Dr.  Pusey  ; 
it  may  regret,  perhaps,  that  it  did  not  wait  for  so 
distinguished  a  mark  for  its  censure ;  but  its  atten- 
tion has  been  drawn  to  some  smaller  offenders  of  the 
same  way  of  thinking,  and  it  has  been  induced  to 
open  all  the  floodgates  of  its  sonorous  and  antiquated 
verbiage  to  sweep  away  and  annihilate  a  poor  little 
London  periodical — ''^  ephemeride??i  cui  tituhis,  ^  The 
Union  Review.^ "  The  Archbishop  of  Westminster, 
not  deigning  to  name  Dr.  Pusey,  has  seized  the 
opportunity    to    reiterate    emphatically,    in    stately 


400      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "      xxvii 

periods  and  with  a  polished  sarcasm,  his  boundless 
contempt  for  the  foolish  people  who  dare  to  come 
"with  swords  wreathed  in  myrtle"  between  the 
Catholic  Church  and  "her  mission  to  the  great 
people  of  England."  On  the  other  hand,  there  have 
been  not  a  few  Roman  Catholics  who  have  listened 
with  interest  and  sympathy  to  what  Dr.  Pusey  had  to 
say,  and,  though  obviously  they  had  but  one  answer 
to  give,  have  given  it  with  a  sense  of  the  real  con- 
dition and  history  of  the  Christian  world,  and  with 
the  respect  due  to  a  serious  attempt  to  look  evils 
in  the  face.  But  there  is  only  one  person  on  the 
Roman  Catholic  side  whose  reflections  on  the  subject 
English  readers  in  general  would  much  care  to  know. 
Anybody  could  tell  beforehand  w'hat  Archbishop 
Manning  would  say  ;  but  people  could  not  feel  so 
certain  what  Dr.  Newman  might  say. 

Dr.  Newman  has  given  his  answer ;  and  his 
answer  is,  of  course,  in  effect  the  same  as  that  of 
the  rest  of  his  co-religionists.  He  offers  not  the 
faintest  encouragement  to  Dr.  Pusey's  sanguine 
hopes.  If  it  is  possible  to  conceive  that  one  side 
could  move  in  the  matter,  it  is  absolutely  certain 
that  the  other  would  be  inflexible.  Any  such 
dealing  on  equal  terms  with  the  heresy  and  schism 
of  centuries  is  not  to  be  thought  of;  no  one  need 
affect  surprise  at  the  refusal.  What  Dr.  Pusey  asks 
is,  in  fact,  to  pull  the  foundation  out  from  under  the 
whole  structure  of  Roman  Catholic  pretensions.  Dr. 
Newman  docs  not  waste  words  to  show  that  the  plan 


XXVII     DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "       401 

of  the  Eirenicon  is  impossible.  He  evidently  assumes 
that  it  is  so,  and  we  agree  with  him.  But  there  are 
different  ways  of  dispelling  a  generous  dream,  and 
telling  a  serious  man  who  is  in  earnest  that  he  is 
mistaken.  Dr.  Newman  does  justice,  as  he  ought  to 
do,  to  feelings  and  views  which  none  can  enter  into 
better  than  he,  whatever  he  may  think  of  them  now. 
He  does  justice  to  the  understanding  and  honesty, 
as  well  as  the  high  aims,  of  an  old  friend,  once  his 
comrade  in  difficult  and  trying  times,  though  now 
long  parted  from  him  by  profound  differences,  and  to 
the  motives  which  prompted  so  venturous  an  attempt 
as  the  Eirenicon  to  provoke  public  discussion  on  the 
reunion  of  Christendom.  He  is  capable  of  measuring 
the  real  state  of  the  facts,  and  the  mischiefs  and  evils 
for  which  a  remedy  is  wanted,  by  a  more  living  rule 
than  the  suppositions  and  consequences  of  a  cut- 
and-dried  theory.  Rightly  or  wrongly  he  argues — at 
least,  he  gives  us  something  to  think  of.  Perhaps 
not  the  least  of  his  merit  is  that  he  writes  simply 
and  easily  in  choice  and  varied  English,  instead  of 
pompously  ringing  the  changes  on  a  set  oi  formulae 
which  beg  the  question,  and  dinning  into  our  ears 
the  most  extravagant  assertions  of  foreign  ecclesiastical 
arrogance.  We  may  not  always  think  him  fair,  or  a 
sound  reasoner,  but  he  is  conciliatory,  temperate, 
and  often  fearlessly  candid.  He  addresses  readers 
who  will  challenge  and  examine  what  he  says,  not 
those  whose  minds  are  cowed  and  beaten  down 
before   audacity  in   proportion  to  its  coolness,  and 

VOL.  II  2D 


402      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"     xxvii 

whom  paradox,  the  more  extreme  the  better,  fascinates 
and  drags  captive.  To  his  old  friend  he  is  courteous, 
respectful,  sympathetic  ;  where  the  occasion  makes  it 
fitting,  affectionate,  even  playful,  as  men  are  who  can 
afford  to  let  their  real  feelings  come  out,  and  have 
not  to  keep  up  appearances.  Unflinching  he  is 
in  maintaining  his  present  position  as  the  upholder 
of  the  exclusive  claims  of  the  Roman  Church  to 
represent  the  Catholic  Church  of  the  Creeds  ;  but 
he  has  the  good  sense  and  good  feeling  to  remember 
that  he  once  shared  the  views  of  those  whom  he  now 
controverts,  and  that  their  present  feelings  about  the 
divisions  of  Christendom  were  once  his  own.  Such 
language  as  the  following  is  plain,  intelligible,  and 
manly.  Of  course,  he  has  his  own  position,  and  must 
see  things  according  to  it.  But  he  recognises  the 
right  of  conscience  in  those  who,  having  gone  a  long 
way  with  him,  find  that  they  can  go  no  further,  and 
he  pays  a  compliment,  becoming  as  from  himself, 
and  not  without  foundation  in  fact,  to  the  singular 
influence  which,  from  whatever  cause,  Dr.  Pusey's 
position  gives  him,  and  which,  we  may  add,  imposes 
on  him,  in  more  ways  than  one,  very  gjrave  re- 
sponsibilities : — 

You,  more  than  any  one  else  alive,  have  been  the 
present  and  untiring  agent  by  whom  a  great  work  has 
been  effected  in  it  ;  and,  far  more  than  is  usual,  you 
have  received  in  your  lifetime,  as  well  as  merited,  the 
confidence  of  your  brethren.  You  cannot  speak  merely 
for  yourself;  your  antecedents,  your  existing  influence, 


XXVII     DR.  NEWMAN"  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "       403 

are  a  pledge  to  us  that  what  you  may  determine  will  be 
the  determination  of  a  multitude.  Numbers,  too,  for 
whom  you  cannot  properly  be  said  to  speak,  will  be 
moved  by  your  authority  or  your  arguments  ;  and 
numbers,  again,  who  are  of  a  school  more  recent  than 
your  own,  and  who  are  only  not  your  followers  because 
they  have  outstripped  you  in  their  free  speeches  and 
demonstrative  acts  in  our  behalf,  will,  for  the  occasion, 
accept  you  as  their  spokesman.  There  is  no  one  any- 
where— among  ourselves,  in  your  own  body,  or,  I  suppose, 
in  the  Greek  Church — who  can  affect  so  vast  a  circle  of 
men,  so  virtuous,  so  able,  so  learned,  so  zealous,  as  come, 
more  or  less,  under  your  influence ;  and  I  cannot  pay  them 
all  a  greater  compliment  than  to  tell  them  they  ought  all 
to  be  Catholics,  nor  do  them  a  more  affectionate  service 
than  to  pray  that  they  may  one  day  become  such.  .  .  . 
I  recollect  well  what  an  outcast  I  seemed  to  myself  when 
I  took  down  from  the  shelves  of  my  library  the  volumes 
of  St.  Athanasius  or  St.  Basil,  and  set  myself  to  study 
them  ;  and  how,  on  the  contrary,  when  at  length  I  was 
brought  into  Catholicism,  I  kissed  them  with  delight, 
with  a  feeling  that  in  them  I  had  more  than  all  that  I 
had  lost,  and,  as  though  I  were  directly  addressing  the 
glorious  saints  who  bequeathed  them  to  the  Church,  I 
said  to  the  inanimate  pages,  "You  are  now  mine,  and  I 
am  now  yours,  beyond  any  mistake."  Such,  I  conceive, 
would  be  the  joy  of  the  persons  I  speak  of  if  they  could 
wake  up  one  morning  and  find  themselves  possessed  by 
right  of  Catholic  traditions  and  hopes,  without  violence 
to  their  own  sense  of  duty  ;  and  certainly  I  am  the  last 
man  to  say  that  such  violence  is  in  any  case  lawful,  that 
the  claims  of  conscience  are  not  paramount,  or  that  any 


404      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "     xxvii 

one  may  overleap  what  he  deliberately  holds  to  be  God's 
command,  in  order  to  make  his  path  easier  for  him  or 
his  heart  lighter. 

I  am  the  last  man  to  quarrel  with  this  jealous  deference 
to  the  voice  of  our  conscience,  whatever  judgment  others 
may  form  of  us  in  consequence,  for  this  reason,  because 
their  case,  as  it  at  present  stands,  has  as  you  know  been  my 
own.  You  recollect  well  what  hard  things  were  said  against 
us  twenty-five  years  ago  which  we  knew  in  our  hearts  we 
did  not  deserve.  Hence,  I  am  now  in  the  position  of  the 
fugitive  Queen  in  the  well-known  passage,  who,  '•'■  haud 
ignara  7nalt"  herself,  had  learned  to  sympathise  with 
those  who  were  inheritors  of  her  past  wanderings. 

Dr.  Newman's  hopes,  and  what  most  of  his 
countrymen  consider  the  hopes  of  truth  and  religion, 
are  not  the  same.  His  wish  is,  of  course,  that  his 
friend  should  follow  him  ;  a  wish  in  which  there  is 
not  the  slightest  reason  to  think  that  he  will  be 
gratified.  But  differently  as  we  must  feel  as  to  the 
result,  we  cannot  help  sharing  the  evident  amuse- 
ment with  which  Dr.  Newman  recalls  a  few  of  the 
compliments  which  were  lavished  on  him  by  some 
of  his  present  co-religionists  when  he  was  trying  to  do 
them  justice,  and  was  even  on  the  w^ay  to  join  them. 
He  reprints  with  sly  and  mischievous  exactness  a 
string  of  those  glib  phrases  of  controversial  dislike 
and  suspicion  which  are  common  to  all  parties,  and 
which  were  applied  to  him  by  "priests,  good  men, 
whose  zeal  outstripped  their  knowledge,  and  who  in 
consequence    spoke  confidently,   when    they    would 


XXVII     DK.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "      405 

have  been  wiser  had  they  suspended  their  adverse 
judgment  of  those  whom  they  were  soon  to  welcome 
as  brothers  in  communion."  It  is  a  trifle,  but  it 
strikes  us  as  characteristic.  Dr.  Newman  is  one  of 
the  very  few  who  have  carried  into  his  present 
communion,  to  a  certain  degree  at  least,  an  English 
habit  of  not  letting  off  the  blunders  and  follies  of  his 
own  side,  and  of  daring  to  think  that  a  cause  is 
better  served  by  outspoken  independence  of  judgment 
than  by  fulsome,  unmitigated  puffing.  It  might  be 
well  if  even  in  him  there  were  a  little  more  of  this 
habit.  But,  so  far  as  it  goes,  it  is  the  difference 
between  him  and  most  of  those  who  are  leaders  on 
his  side.  Indirectly  he  warns  eager  controversialists 
that  they  are  not  always  the  wisest  and  the  most 
judicious  and  far-seeing  of  men ;  and  we  cannot 
quarrel  with  him,  however  little  we  may  like  the 
occasion,  for  the  entertainment  which  he  feels  in 
inflicting  on  his  present  brethren  what  they  once 
judged  and  said  of  him,  and  in  reminding  them  that 
their  proficiency  in  polemical  rhetoric  did  not  save 
them  from  betraying  the  shallowness  of  their  estimate 
and  the  shortness  of  their  foresight. 

When  he  comes  to  discuss  the  Eirenicon^  Dr.  New- 
man begins  with  a  complaint  which  seems  to  us  alto- 
gether unreasonable.  He  seems  to  thinkit  hard  that  Dr. 
Pusey  should  talk  of  peace  and  reunion,  and  yet  speak 
so  strongly  of  what  he  considers  the  great  corruptions 
of  the  Roman  Church.  In  ordinary  controversy,  says 
Dr.  Newman,  we  know  what  we  are  about  and  what  to 


40G      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"      xxvii 

expect ;  "  '  Caedimur^  et  totidem  plagis  consumimus 
hostem.^  We  give  you  a  sharp  cut  and  you  return  it. 
.  .  .  But  we  at  least  have  not  professed  to  be  compos- 
ing an  Eirenicon^  when  we  treated  you  as  foes."  Like 
Archbishop  Manning,  Dr.  Newman  is  reminded  "of  the 
sword  wreathed  in  myrtle ; "  but  Dr.  Pusey,  he  says, 
has  improved  on  the  ancient  device, — "Excuse  me, 
you  discharge  your  olive-branch  as  if  from  a  catapult." 
This  is,  no  doubt,  exactly  what  Dr.  Pusey  has 
done.  Going  much  further  than  the  great  majority 
of  his  countrymen  will  go  with  him  in  admissions  in 
favour  of  the  Roman  Catholic  Church,  he  has  pointed 
out  with  a  distinctness  and  force,  never,  perhaps, 
exceeded,  what  is  the  impassable  barrier  which,  as 
long  as  it  lasts,  makes  every  hope  of  union  idle.  The 
practical  argument  against  Rome  is  stated  by  him  in 
a  shape  which  comes  home  to  the  consciences  of  all, 
whatever  their  theological  training  and  leanings,  who 
have  been  brought  up  in  English  ways  and  ideas  of 
religion.  But  why  should  he  not?  He  is  desirous 
of  union — the  reunion  of  the  whole  of  Christendom. 
He  gives  full  credit  to  the  Roman  communion — 
much  more  credit  than  most  of  his  brethren  think 
him  justified  in  giving — for  what  is  either  defensible 
or  excellent  in  it.  Dr.  Newman  must  be  perfectly 
aware  that  Dr.  Pusey  has  gone  to  the  very  outside  of 
what  our  public  feeling  in  England  will  bear  in  favour 
of  efforts  for  reconciliation,  and  he  nowhere  shows 
any  sign  that  he  is  thinking  of  unconditional  submis- 
sion.     How,    then,    can    he  be  expected  to  mince 


XXVII     DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "      407 

matters  and  speak  smoothly  when  he  comes  to  what 
he  regards  as  the  real  knot  of  the  difficulty,  the  real 
and  fatal  bar  to  all  possibility  of  a  mutual  under- 
standing ?  If  his  charges  are  untrue  or  exaggerated 
in  detail  or  colouring,  that  is  another  matter ;  but  the 
whole  of  his  pleading  for  peace  presupposes  that 
there  are  great  and  serious  obstacles  to  it  in  what 
is  practically  taught  and  authorised  in  the  Roman 
Church ;  and  it  is  rather  hard  to  blame  him  for  "  not 
making  the  best  of  things,"  and  raising  difficulties  in 
the  way  of  the  very  object  which  he  seeks,  because 
he  states  the  truth  about  these  obstacles.  We  are 
afraid  that  we  must  be  of  Dr.  Newman's  opinion  that 
the  Eirenicon  is  not  calculated  to  lead,  in  our  time  at 
least,  to  what  it  aims  at — the  reunion  of  Christen- 
dom ;  but  this  arises  from  the  real  obstacles  them- 
selves, not  from  Dr.  Pusey's  way  of  stating  them. 
There  may  be  no  way  to  peace,  but  surely  if  there  is, 
though  it  impHes  giving  full  w^eight  to  your  sympathies, 
and  to  the  points  on  which  you  may  give  way,  it  also 
involves  the  possibility  of  speaking  out.  plainly,  and 
also  of  being  listened  to,  on  the  points  on  which 
you  really  disagree.  Does  Dr.  Newman  think  that 
all  Dr.  Pusey  felt  he  had  to  do  was  to  conciliate 
Roman  Catholics?  Does  it  follow,  because  objec- 
tions are  intemperately  and  unfairly  urged  on  the 
Protestant  side,  that  therefore  they  are  not  felt  quite 
as  much  in  earnest  by  sober  and  tolerant  people,  and 
that  they  may  not  be  stated  in  their  real  force  without 
giving  occasion  for  the  remark  that  this  is  reviving 


408      DR.  NEWMAN  OX  THE  "  EIREXICOX  "     xxvii 

the  old  cruel  war  against  Rome,  and  rekindling  a 
fierce  style  of  polemics  which  is  now  out  of  date  ? 
And  how  is  Dr.  Pusey  to  state  these  objections  if, 
when  he  goes  into  them,  not  in  a  vague  declamatory 
way,  but  showing  his  respect  and  seriousness  by  his 
guarded  and  full  and  definite  manner  of  proof,  he  is 
to  be  met  by  the  charge  that  he  does  not  show  suffi- 
cient consideration  ?  All  this  may  be  a  reason  for 
thinking  it  vain  to  write  an  Eirenicon  at  all.  But  if 
one  is  to  be  attempted,  it  certainly  will  not  do  to 
make  it  a  book  of  compliments.  Its  first  condition  is 
that  if  it  makes  light  of  lesser  difificulties  it  should 
speak  plainly  about  greater  ones. 

But  this  is,  after  all,  a  matter  of  feeling.  No 
doubt,  as  Dr.  Newman  says,  people  are  not  pleased 
or  conciliated  by  elaborate  proofs  that  they  are  guilty 
of  something  very  wrong  or  foolish.  What  is  of 
more  interest  is  to  know  the  effect  on  a  man  like  Dr. 
Newman  of  such  a  display  of  the  prevailing  tendency 
of  religious  thought  and  devotion  in  his  communion 
as  Dr.  Pusey  has  given  from  Roman  Catholic  writers. 
And  it  is  plain  that,  whoever  else  is  satisfied  with 
them,  these  tendencies  are  not  entirely  satisfactory 
to  Dr.  Newman.  That  rage  for  foreign  ideas  and 
foreign  usages  which  has  come  over  a  section  of  his 
friends,  the  loudest  and  perhaps  the  ablest  section  of 
them,  has  no  charms  for  him.  He  asserts  resolutely 
and  rather  sternly  his  right  to  have  an  opinion  of  his 
own,  and  declines  to  commit  himself,  or  to  allow  that 
his  cause  is  committed,  to  a  school  of  teacb'ng  which 


xxYii     DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "       409 

happens  for  the  moment  to  have  the  talk  to  itself;  and 
he  endeavours  at  great  length  to  present  a  view  of  the 
teaching  of  his  Church  which  shall  be  free,  if  not  from 
all  Dr.  Pusey's  objections,  yet  from  a  certain  number 
of  them,  which  to  Dr.  Newman  himself  appear  grave. 
After  disclaiming  or  correcting  certain  alleged 
admissions  of  his  own,  on  which  Dr.  Pusey  had 
placed  a  construction  too  favourable  to  the  Anglican 
Church,  Dr.  Newman  comes  to  a  passage  which 
seems  to  rouse  him.  A  convert,  says  Dr.  Pusey, 
must  take  things  as  he  finds  them  in  his  new  com- 
munion, and  it  would  be  unbecoming  in  him  to 
criticise.  This  statement  gives  Dr.  Newman  the 
opportunity  of  saying  that,  except  with  large  quali- 
fications, he  does  not  accept  it  for  himself.  Of  course, 
he  says,  there  are  considerations  of  modesty,  of 
becomingness,  of  regard  to  the  feelings  of  others  with 
equal  or  greater  claims  than  himself,  which  bind  a 
convert  as  they  bind  any  one  who  has  just  gained 
admission  into  a  society  of  his  fellow  men.  He  has 
no  business  "to  pick  and  choose,"  and  to  set  himself 
up  as  a  judge  of  everything  in  his  new  position.  But 
though  every  man  of  sense  who  thought  he  had 
reason  for  so  great  a  change  would  be  generous  and 
loyal  in  accepting  his  new  religion  as  a  whole,  in 
time  he  comes  "  to  have  a  right  to  speak  as  well  as  to 
hear ; "  and  for  this  right,  both  generally  and  in  his 
own  case,  he  stands  up  very  resolutely  : — 

Also,  in  course  of  time  a  new  generation  rises  round 
him,  and  there  is  no  reason  why  he  should  not  know  as 


•ilO      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"     xxvii 

much,  and  decide  questions  with  as  true  an  instinct,  as 
those  who  perhaps  number  fewer  years  than  he  does 
Easter  communions.  He  has  mastered  the  fact  and  the 
nature  of  the  differences  of  theologian  from  theologian, 
school  from  school,  nation  from  nation,  era  from  era. 
He  knows  that  there  is  much  of  what  may  be  called 
fashion  in  opinions  and  practices,  according  to  the 
circumstances  of  time  and  place,  according  to  current 
politics,  the  character  of  the  Pope  of  the  day,  or  the 
chief  Prelates  of  a  particular  country  ;  and  that  fashions 
change.  His  experience  tells  him  that  sometimes  what 
is  denounced  in  one  place  as  a  great  offence,  or  preached 
up  as  a  first  principle,  has  in  another  nation  been  im- 
memorially  regarded  in  just  a  contrary  sense,  or  has 
made  no  sensation  at  all,  one  way  or  the  other,  when 
brought  before  public  opinion  ;  and  that  loud  talkers,  in 
the  Church  as  elsewhere,  are  apt  to  carry  all  before 
them,  while  quiet  and  conscientious  persons  commonly 
have  to  give  way.  He  perceives  that,  in  matters  which 
happen  to  be  in  debate,  ecclesiastical  authority  watches 
the  state  of  opinion  and  the  direction  and  course  of  con- 
troversy, and  decides  accordingly ;  so  that  in  certain 
cases  to  keep  back  his  own  judgment  on  a  point  is  to  be 
disloyal  to  his  superiors. 

So  far  generally ;  now  in  particular  as  to  myself. 
After  twenty  years  of  Catholic  life,  I  feel  no  delicacy 
in  giving  my  opinion  on  any  point  when  there  is 
a  call  for  me,  —  and  the  only  reason  why  I  have 
not  done  so  sooner  or  more  often  than  I  have,  is 
that  there  has  been  no  call.  I  have  now  reluctantly 
come  to  the  conclusion  that  your  Volume  is  a  call. 
Certainly,  in  many  instances  in  which  theologian  differs 


XXVII     DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"       411 

from  theologian,  and  country  from  country,  I  have  a 
definite  judgment  of  my  own  ;  I  can  say  so  without 
offence  to  any  one,  for  the  very  reason  that  from  the 
nature  of  the  case  it  is  impossible  to  agree  with  all  of 
them.  I  prefer  English  habits  of  belief  and  devotion  to 
foreign,  from  the  same  causes,  and  by  the  same  right, 
which  justifies  foreigners  in  preferring  their  own.  In 
following  those  of  my  people,  I  show  less  singularity, 
and  create  less  disturbance  than  if  I  made  a  flourish 
with  what  is  novel  and  exotic.  And  in  this  line  of  con- 
duct I  am  but  availing  myself  of  the  teaching  which  I 
fell  in  with  on  becoming  a  Catholic  ;  and  it  is  a  pleasure 
to  me  to  think  that  what  I  hold  now,  and  would  transmit 
after  me  if  I  could,  is  only  what  I  received  then. 

He  observes  that  when  he  first  joined  the  Roman 
Catholic  Church  the  utmost  delicacy  was  observed  in 
giving  him  advice ;  and  the  only  warning  which  he 
can  recollect  was  from  the  Vicar -General  of  the 
London  district,  who  cautioned  him  against  books  of 
devotion  of  the  Italian  school,  which  were  then  just 
coming  into  England,  and  recommended  him  to  get, 
as  safe  guides,  the  works  of  Bishop  Hay.  Bishop 
Hay's  name  is  thus,  probably  for  the  first  time,  in- 
troduced to  the  general  English  public.  It  is  difficult 
to  forbear  a  smile  at  the  great  Oxford  teacher,  the 
master  of  religious  thought  and  feeling  to  thousands, 
being  gravely  set  to  learn  his  lesson  of  a  more  perfect 
devotion,  how  to  meditate  and  how  to  pray,  from 
*'  the  works  of  Bishop  Hay  "  ;  it  is  hardly  more  easy 
to  forbear  a  smile  at  his  recording  it.     But  Bishop 


412      DR.  KEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"      xxvii 

Hay  was  a  sort  of  symbol,  and  represents,  he  says, 
English  as  opposed  to  foreign  habits  of  thought ;  and 
to  these  English  habits  he  not  only  gives  his  pre- 
ference, but  he  maintains  that  they  are  more  truly 
those  of  the  whole  Roman  Catholic  body  in  England 
than  the  more  showy  and  extreme  doctrines  of  a 
newer  school.  Dr.  Pusey  does  wrong,  he  says,  in 
taking  this  new  school  as  the  true  exponent  of  Roman 
Catholic  ideas.  That  it  is  popular  he  admits,  but  its 
popularity  is  to  be  accounted  for  by  personal  quali- 
fications in  its  leaders  for  gaining  the  ear  of  the  world, 
without  supposing  that  they  speak  for  their  body. 

Though  I  am  a  convert,  then;  I  think  I  have  a  right 
to  speak  out ;  and  that  the  more  because  other  converts 
have  spoken  for  a  long  time,  while  I  have  not  spoken  ; 
and  with  still  more  reason  may  I  speak  without  offence 
in  the  case  of  your  present  criticisms  of  us,  considering 
that  in  the  charges  you  bring  the  only  two  English 
writers  you  quote  in  evidence  are  both  of  them  converts, 
younger  in  age  than  myself.  I  put  aside  the  Archbishop 
of  course,  because  of  his  office.  These  two  authors  are 
worthy  of  all  consideration,  at  once  from  their  character 
and  from  their  ability.  In  their  respective  lines  they 
are  perhaps  without  equals  at  this  particular  time  ;  and 
they  deserve  the  influence  they  possess.  One  is  still  in 
the  vigour  of  his  powers  ;  the  other  has  departed  amid 
the  tears  of  hundreds.  It  is  pleasant  to  praise  them  for 
their  real  qualifications  ;  but  why  do  you  rest  on  them 
as  authorities  ?  Because  the  one  was  "  a  popular  writer" ; 
but  is  there  not  sufficient  reason  for  this  in  the  fact  of 
his  remarkable  gifts,  of  his  poetical  fancy,  his  engaging 


XXVII     DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"       413 

frankness,  his  playful  wit,  his  affectionateness,  his  sen- 
sitive piety,  without  supposing  that  the  wide  diffusion 
of  his  works  arises  out  of  his  particular  sentiments  about 
the  Blessed  Virgin  ?  And  as  to  our  other  friend,  do  not 
his  energy,  acuteness,  and  theological  reading,  displayed 
on  the  vantage  ground  of  the  historic  Dublin  Review^ 
fully  account  for  the  sensation  he  has  produced,  without 
supposing  that  any  great  number  of  our  body  go  his 
lengths  in  their  view  of  the  Pope's  infallibility  ?  Our 
silence  as  regards  their  writings  is  very  intelligible  ;  it  is 
not  agreeable  to  protest,  in  the  sight  of  the  world, 
against  the  writings  of  men  in  our  own  communion 
whom  we  love  and  respect.  But  the  plain  fact  is  this — 
they  came  to  the  Church,  and  have  thereby  saved  their 
souls  ;  but  they  are  in  no  sense  spokesmen  for  English 
Catholics,  and  they  must  not  stand  in  the  place  of  those 
who  have  a  real  title  to  such  an  office. 

And  he  appeals  from  them,  as  authorities,  to  a  hst 
of  much  more  sober  and  modest  writers,  though,  it 
may  be,  the  names  of  all  of  them  are  not  familiar  to 
the  public.  He  enumerates  as  the  "  chief  authors  of 
the  passing  generation,"  "Cardinal  Wiseman,  Dr. 
Ullathorne,  Dr.  Lingard,  Mr.  Tierney,  Dr.  Oliver, 
Dr.  Rock,  Dr.  Waterworth,  Dr.  Husenbeth,  Mr. 
Flanagan."  If  these  well-practised  and  circumspect 
veterans  in  the  ancient  controversy  are  not  original 
and  brilliant,  at  least  they  are  safe ;  and  Dr.  New- 
man will  not  allow  the  flighty  intellectualism  which 
takes  more  hold  of  modern  readers  to  usurp  their 
place,  and  for  himself  he  sturdily  and  bluffly  dechnes 
to  give  up  his  old  standing-ground  for  any  one : — 


414      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"     xxvii 

I  cannot,  then,  without  remonstrance,  allow  you  to 
identify  the  doctrine  of  our  Oxford  friends  in  question, 
on  the  two  subjects  I  have  mentioned,  with  the  present 
spirit  or  the  prospective  creed  of  Catholics ;  or  to 
assume,  as  you  do,  that  because  they  are  thorough- 
going and  relentless  in  their  statements,  therefore  they 
are  the  harbingers  of  a  new  age,  when  to  show  a 
deference  for  Antiquity  will  be  thought  little  else  than  a 
mistake.  For  myself,  hopeless  as  you  consider  it,  I  am 
not  ashamed  still  to  take  my  stand  upon  the  Fathers, 
and  do  not  mean  to  budge.  The  history  of  their  time 
is  not  yet  an  old  almanac  to  me.  Of  course  I  maintain 
the  value  and  authority  of  the  "  Schola,"  as  one  of  the 
loci  theologici ;  still  I  sympathise  with  Petavius  in  pre- 
ferring to  its  "contentious  and  subtle  theology"  that 
"  more  elegant  and  fruitful  teaching  which  is  moulded 
after  the  image  of  erudite  antiquity."  The  Fathers  made 
me  a  Catholic,  and  I  am  not  going  to  kick  down  the 
ladder  by  which  I  ascended  into  the  Church.  It  is  a 
ladder  quite  as  serviceable  for  that  purpose  now  as  it 
was  twenty  years  ago.  Though  I  hold,  as  you  remark, 
a  process  of  development  in  Apostolic  truth  as  time  goes 
on,  such  development  does  not  supersede  the  Fathers, 
but  explains  and  completes  them. 

Is  he  right  in  saying  that  he  is  not  responsible  as 
a  Roman  Catholic  for  the  extravagances  that  Dr. 
Pusey  dwells  upon  ?  He  is,  it  seems  to  us,  and  he 
is  not.  No  doubt  the  Roman  Catholic  system  is  in 
practice  a  wide  one,  and  he  has  a  right,  which  w^e  are 
glad  to  see  that  he  is  disposed  to  exercise,  to  main- 
lain  the  claims  of  moderation  and  soberness,  and  to 


XXVII     DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"       415 

decline  to  submit  his  judgment  to  the  fashionable 
theories  of  the  hour.  A  stand  made  for  independ- 
ence and  good  sense  against  the  pressure  of  an  ex- 
acting and  overbearing  dogmatism  is  a  good  thing 
for  everybody,  though  made  in  a  camp  with  which  we 
have  nothing  to  do.  He  goes  far  enough,  indeed, 
as  it  is.  Still,  it  is  something  that  a  great  writer, 
of  whose  genius  and  religious  feeling  Englishmen  will 
one  day  be  even  prouder  than  they  are  now,  should 
disconnect  himself  from  the  extreme  follies  of  his 
party,  and  attempt  to  represent  what  is  the  nobler 
and  more  elevated  side  of  the  system  to  which  he 
has  attached  himself.  But  it  seems  to  us  much 
more  difficult  for  him  to  release  his  cause  from  com- 
plicity with  the  doctrines  which  he  dislikes  and  fears. 
We  have  no  doubt  that  he  is  not  alone,  and  that 
there  are  numbers  of  his  English  brethren  who  are 
provoked  and  ashamed  at  the  self-complacent  arrog- 
ance and  childish  folly  shown  in  exaggerating  and 
caricaturing  doctrines  which  are,  in  the  eyes  of  most 
Englishmen,  extravagant  enough  in  themselves.  But 
the  question  is  whether  he  or  the  innovators  represent 
the  true  character  and  tendencies  of  their  religious 
system.  It  must  be  remembered  that  with  a  jealous 
and  touchy  Government,  like  that  of  the  Roman 
Church,  which  professes  the  duty  and  boasts  of  the 
power  to  put  down  all  dangerous  ideas  and  language, 
mere  tolerance  means  much.  Dr.  Newman  speaks 
as  an  Englishman  when  he  writes  thus : — 

This   is   specially  the   case  with    great   ideas.     You 


416       DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "      xxvii 

may  stifle  them  ;  or  you  may  refuse  them  elbow-room  ; 
or  you  may  torment  them  with  your  continual  meddling ; 
or  you  may  let  them  have  free  course  and  range,  and  be 
content,  instead  of  anticipating  their  excesses,  to  expose 
and  restrain  those  excesses  after  they  have  occurred. 
But  you  have  only  this  alternative  ;  and  for  myself,  I 
prefer  much,  wherever  it  is  possible,  to  be  first  generous 
and  then  just ;  to  grant  full  liberty  of  thought,  and  to 
call  it  to  account  when  abused. 

But  that  has  never  been  the  principle  of  his 
Church.  At  least,  the  liberty  which  it  has  allowed 
has  been  a  most  one-sided  liberty.  It  has  been  the 
liberty  to  go  any  length  in  developing  the  favourite 
opinions  about  the  power  of  the  Pope,  or  some 
popular  form  of  devotion ;  but  as  to  other  ideas, 
not  so  congenial,  "  great "  ones  and  little  ones  too, 
the  lists  of  the  Roman  Index  bear  witness  to  the 
sensitive  vigilance  which  took  alarm  even  at  remote 
danger.  And  those  whose  pride  it  is  that  they  are 
ever  ready  and  able  to  stop  all  going  astray  must  be 
held  responsible  for  the  going  astray  which  they  do 
not  stop,  especially  when  it  coincides  with  what  they 
wish  and  like. 

But  these  extreme  writers  do  not  dream  of  toler- 
ance. They  stoutly  and  boldly  maintain  that  they 
but  interpret  in  the  only  natural  and  consistent 
manner  the  mind  of  their  Church ;  and  no  public 
or  official  contradiction  meets  them.  There  may 
be  a  disapproving  opinion  in  their  own  body,  but 
it  does  not  show  itself.     The  disclaimer  of  even  such 


XXVII     DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"       417 

a  man  as  Dr.  Newman  is  in  the  highest  degree 
guarded  and  quaUfied.  They  are  the  people  who 
can  excite  attention  and  gain  a  hearing,  though  it  be 
an  adverse  one.  They  have  the  power  to  make 
themselves  the  most  prominent  and  accredited  repre- 
sentatives of  their  creed,  and,  if  thoroughgoing  bold- 
ness and  ability  are  apt  to  attract  the  growth  of 
thought  and  conviction,  they  are  those  who  are  likely 
to  mould  its  future  form.  Sober  prudent  people  may 
prefer  the  caution  of  Dr.  Newman's  "chief  authors," 
but  to  the  world  outside  most  of  these  will  be  little 
more  than  names,  and  the  advanced  party,  which 
talks  most  strongly  about  the  Pope's  infaUibility  and 
devotion  to  St.  Mary,  has  this  to  say  for  itself. 
Popular  feeling  everywhere  in  the  Roman  com- 
munion appears  to  go  with  it,  and  authority  both  in 
Rome  and  in  England  shelters  and  sanctions  it. 
Nothing  can  be  more  clearly  and  forcibly  stated  than 
the  following  assertions  of  the  unimpeachable  claim 
of  "  dominant  opinions "  in  the  Roman  Catholic 
system  by  the  highest  Roman  Catholic  authority  in 
England.  "It  is  an  ill-advised  overture  of  peace," 
writes  Archbishop  Manning, 

to  assail  the  popular,  prevalent,  and  dominant  opinions, 
devotions,  and  doctrines  of  the  Catholic  Church  with 
hostile  criticism.  .  .  .  The  presence  and  assistance 
of  the  Holy  Ghost,  which  secures  the  Church  within 
the  sphere  of  faith  and  morals,  invests  it  also  with 
instincts  and  a  discernment  which  preside  over  its 
worship  and  doctrines,  its  practices  and  customs.  We 
VOL.  II  2  E 


418       DR.  NEWMAN  OX  THE  "EIRENICON"      xxvii 

may  be  sure  that  whatever  is  prevalent  in  the  Church, 
under  the  eye  of  its  pubhc  authority,  practised  by  the 
people,  and  not  censured  by  its  pastors,  is  at  least  con- 
formable to  faith  and  innocent  as  to  morals.  Whoso- 
ever rises  up  to  condemn  such  practices  and  opinions 
thereby  convicts  himself  of  the  private  spirit  which  is  the 
root  of  heresy.  But  if  it  be  ill-advised  to  assail  the  mind 
of  the  Church,  it  is  still  more  so  to  oppose  its  visible 
Head.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  Sovereign 
Pontiff  has  declared  the  same  opinion  as  to  the  temporal 
power  as  that  which  is  censured  in  others,  and  that  he 
defined  the  Immaculate  Conception,  and  that  he  believes 
in  his  own  infallibility.  If  these  things  be  our  reproach, 
we  share  it  with  the  Vicar  of  Jesus  Christ.  They  are 
not  our  private  opinions,  nor  the  tenets  of  a  school,  but 
the  mind  of  the  Pontiff,  as  they  were  of  his  predecessors, 
as  they  will  be  of  those  who  come  after  him. — Arch- 
bishop Manning's  Pastoral^  pp.  64-66,  1866. 

To  maintain  his  liberty  against  extreme  opinions 
generally  is  one  of  Dr.  Newman's  objects  in  writing 
his  letter;  the  other  is  to  state  distinctly  what  he 
holds  and  what  he  does  not  hold,  as  regards  the 
subject  on  which  Dr.  Pusey's  appeal  has  naturally 
made  so  deep  an  impression  : — 

I  do  so,  because  you  say,  as  I  myself  have  said  in 
former  years,  that  "  That  vast  system  as  to  the  Blessed 
Virgin  ...  to  all  of  us  has  been  the  special  crux  of  the 
Roman  system"  (p.  loi).  Here,  I  say,  as  on  other 
points,  the  Fathers  are  enough  for  me.  I  do  not  wish 
to  say  more  than  they,  and  will  not  say  less.  You,  I 
know,  will  profess  the  same  ;  and  thus  we  can  join  issue 


XXVII     DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"       419 

on  a  clear  and  broad  principle,  and  may  hope  to  come 
to  some  intelligible  result.  We  are  to  have  a  treatise 
on  the  subject  of  Our  Lady  soon  from  the  pen  of 
the  Most  Rev.  Prelate  ;  but  that  cannot  interfere  with 
such  a  mere  argument  from  the  Fathers  as  that  to 
which  I  shall  confine  myself  here.  Nor,  indeed,  as 
regards  that  argument  itself,  do  I  profess  to  be  offering 
you  any  new  matter,  any  -facts  which  have  not  been 
used  by  others, — by  great  divines,  as  Petavius,  by  living 
writers,  nay,  by  myself  on  other  occasions.  I  write 
afresh,  nevertheless,  and  that  for  three  reasons — first, 
because  I  wish  to  contribute  to  the  accurate  statement 
and  the  full  exposition  of  the  argument  in  question  ; 
next,  because  I  may  gain  a  more  patient  hearing  than 
has  sometimes  been  granted  to  better  men  than  myself; 
lastly,  because  there  just  now  seems  a  call  on  me,  under 
my  circumstances,  to  avow  plainly  what  I  do  and  what 
I  do  not  hold  about  the  Blessed  Virgin,  that  others  may 
know,  did  they  come  to  stand  where  I  stand,  what  they 
would  and  what  they  would  not  be  bound  to  hold  con- 
cerning her. 

If  this  "  vast  system  "  is  a  crux  to  any  one,  we 
cannot  think  that  even  Dr.  Newman's  explanation 
will  make  it  easier.  He  himself  recoils,  as  any 
Englishman  of  sense  and  common  feeling  must,  at 
the  wild  extravagances  into  which  this  devotion  has 
run.  But  he  accepts  and  defends,  on  the  most  pre- 
carious grounds,  the  whole  system  of  thought  out  of 
which  they  have  sprung  by  no  very  violent  process 
of  growth.  He  cannot,  of  course,  stop  short  of 
accepting  the  definition  of  the  Immaculate  Concep- 


420      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "      xxvii 

tion  as  an  article  of  faith,  and,  though  he  emphatic- 
ally condemns,  with  a  warmth  and  energy  of  which 
no  one  can  doubt  the  sincerity,  a  number  of  revolting 
consequences  drawn  from  the  theology  of  which  that 
dogma  is  the  expression,  he  is  obliged  to  defend 
everything  up  to  that.  For  a  professed  disciple  of 
the  Fathers  this  is  not  easy.  If  anything  is  certain, 
it  is  that  the  place  which  the  Blessed  Virgin  occupies 
in  the  Roman  Cathohc  system — popular  or  authori- 
tative, if  it  is  possible  fairly  to  urge  such  a  distinction 
in  a  system  which  boasts  of  all-embracing  authority — 
is  something  perfectly  different  from  anything  known 
in  the  first  four  centuries.  In  all  the  voluminous 
writings  on  theology  which  remain  from  them  we  may 
look  in  vain  for  any  traces  of  that  feeling  which  finds 
words  in  the  common  hymn,  ^^  Ave,  maris  Stella,^^  and 
which  makes  her  fill  so  large  a  space  in  the  teaching 
and  devotion  of  the  Roman  Church.  Dr.  Newman 
attempts  to  meet  this  difficulty  by  a  distinction. 
The  doctrine,  he  says,  was  there,  the  same  then  as 
now;  it  is  only  the  feelings,  behaviour,  and  usages, 
the  practical  consequences  naturally  springing  from 
the  doctrine,  which  have  varied  or  grown  : — 

1  fully  grant  that  the  devotion  towards  the  Blessed 
Virgin  has  increased  among  Catholics  with  the  progress 
of  centuries.  I  do  not  allow  that  the  doctrine  con- 
cerning her  has  undergone  a  growth,  for  I  believe 
it  has  been  in  substance  one  and  the  same  from  the 
beginning. 

There   is,  doubtless,   such   a  distinction,   though 


XXVII     DE.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "       421 

whether  available  for  Dr.  Newman's  purpose  is 
another  matter.  But  when  we  recollect  that  modern 
"doctrine,"  besides  defining  the  Immaculate  Con- 
ception, places  her  next  in  glory  to  the  Throne  of 
God,  and  makes  her  the  Queen  of  Heaven,  and  the 
all-prevailing  intercessor  with  her  Son,  the  assertion 
as  to  "  doctrine  "  is  a  bold  one.  It  rests,  as  it  seems 
to  us,  simply  on  Dr.  Newman  identifying  his  own 
inferences  from  the  language  of  the  ancient  writers 
whom  he  quotes  with  the  language  itself.  They  say 
a  certain  thing — that  Mary  is  the  "  second  Eve." 
Dr.  Newman,  with  all  the  theology  and  all  the  con- 
troversies of  eighteen  centuries  in  his  mind,  deduces 
from  this  statement  a  number  of  refined  consequences 
as  to  her  sinlessness,  and  greatness,  and  reward,  which 
seem  to  him  to  flow  from  it,  and  says  that  it  means 
all  these  consequences.  Mr.  Ruskin  somewhere 
quotes  the  language  of  an  "eminent  Academician," 
who  remarks,  in  answer  to  some  criticism  on  a 
picture,  "that  if  you  look  for  curves,  you  will  see 
curves ;  and  if  you  look  for  angles,  you  will  see 
angles."  So  it  is  here.  The  very  dogma  of  the 
Immaculate  Conception  itself  Dr.  Newman  sees  in- 
dissolubly  involved  in  the  "  rudimentary  teaching " 
which  insists  on  the  parallelism  between  Eve  and 
Mary : — 

Was  not  Mary  as  fully  endowed  as  Eve  ?  ...  If  Eve 
was  (as  Bishop  Bull  and  others  maintain)  raised  above 
human  nature  by  that  indwelling  moral  gift  which  we 
call  grace,  is  it  rash  to  say  that  Mary  had  a  greater 


422      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "     xxvii 

grace  ?  .  .  .  And  if  Eve  had  this  supernatural  inward 
gift  given  her  from  the  moment  of  her  personal  exist- 
ence, is  it  possible  to  deny  that  Mary,  too,  had  this 
gift  from  the  very  first  moment  of  her  personal  exist- 
ence ?  I  do  not  know  how  to  resist  this  inference  : — 
well,  this  is  simply  and  literally  the  doctrine  of  the 
Immaculate  Conception.  I  say  the  doctrine  of  the 
Immaculate  Conception  is  in  its  substance  this,  and 
nothing  more  or  less  than  this  (putting  aside  the  ques- 
tion of  degrees  of  grace),  and  it  really  does  seem  to  me 
bound  up  in  that  doctrine  of  the  Fathers,  that  Mary  is 
the  second  Eve. 

It  seems  obvious  to  remark  that  the  Fathers  are  not 
even  alleged  to  have  themselves  drawn  this  irresistible 
inference ;  and  next,  that  even  if  it  be  drawn,  there 
is  a  long  interval  between  it  and  the  elevation  of  the 
Mother  of  Jesus  Christ  to  the  place  to  which  modern 
Roman  doctrine  raises  her.  Possibly,  the  Fathers 
might  have  said,  as  many  people  will  say  now,  that, 
in  a  matter  of  this  kind,  it  is  idle  to  draw  inferences 
when  we  are,  in  reality,  utterly  without  the  knowledge 
to  make  them  worth  anything.  At  any  rate,  if  they 
had  drawn  them,  we  should  have  found  some  traces 
of  it  in  their  writings,  and  we  find  none.  We  find 
abundance  of  poetical  addresses  and  rhetorical  ampli- 
fication, which  makes  it  all  the  more  remarkable 
that  the  plain  dogmatic  view  of  her  position,  which 
is  accepted  by  the  Roman  Church,  does  not  appear 
in  them.  We  only  find  a  "rudimentary  doctrine," 
which,  naturalljy  enough,  gives  the  Blessed  Virgin  a 


XXVII     DR.  N"EWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "       423 

very  high  and  sacred  place  in  the  economy  of  the 
Incarnation.  But  how  does  the  doctrine,  as  it  is 
found  in  even  their  rhetorical  passages,  go  a  step 
beyond  what  would  be  accepted  by  any  sober  reader 
of  the  New  Testament?  They  speak  of  what  she 
was ;  they  do  not  presume  to  say  what  she  is.  What 
Protestant  could  have  the  slightest  difficulty  in  saying 
not  only  what  Justin  says,  and  Tertullian  copies  from 
him,  and  Irenaeus  enlarges  upon,  but  what  Dr. 
Newman  himself  says  of  her  awful  and  solitary 
dignity,  always  excepting  the  groundless  assumption 
which,  from  her  office  in  this  w^orld  takes  for  granted, 
first  her  sinlessness,  and  then  a  still  higher  office  in 
the  next?  We  do  not  think  that,  as  a  matter  of 
literary  criticism.  Dr.  Newman  is  fair  in  his  argument 
from  the  Fathers.  He  lays  great  stress  on  Justin 
Martyr,  Tertullian,  and  Irenaeus,  as  three  inde- 
pendent witnesses  from  different  parts  of  the  world ; 
whereas  it  is  obvious  that  Tertullian  at  any  rate 
copies  almost  literally  from  Justin  Martyr,  and  it  is 
impossible  to  compare  a  mere  incidental  point  of 
rhetorical,  or,  if  it  be  so,  argumentative  illustration, 
occurring  once  or  twice  in  a  long  treatise,  with  a 
doctrine,  such  as  that  of  the  Incarnation  itself,  on 
which  the  whole  treatise  is  built,  and  of  which  it  is 
full.  The  wonder  is,  indeed,  that  the  Fathers,  con- 
sidering how  much  they  wrote,  said  so  little  of  her ; 
scarcely  less  is  it  a  wonder,  then,  that  the  New 
Testament  says  so  little,  but  from  this  little  the  only 
reason  which  would  prevent  a  Protestant  reader  of 


424      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"      xxvii 

the  New  Testament  from  accepting  the  highest  state- 
ment of  her  historical  dignity  is  the  reaction  from 
the  development  of  them  into  the  consequences 
which  have  been  notorious  for  centuries  in  the  un- 
reformed  Churches.  Protestants,  left  to  themselves, 
are  certainly  not  prone  to  undervalue  the  saints  of 
Scripture ;  it  has  been  the  presence  of  the  great 
system  of  popular  worship  confronting  them  which 
has  tied  their  tongues  in  this  matter.  Yet  Anglican 
theologians  like  Mr.  Keble,  popular  poets  like  Words- 
worth, broad  Churchmen  like  Mr.  Robertson,  have 
said  things  which  even  Roman  Catholics  might  quote 
as  expressions  of  their  feeling.  But  Dr.  Newman 
must  know  that  many  things  may  be  put,  and  put 
most  truly,  into  the  form  of  poetical  expression  which 
will  not  bear  hardening  into  a  dogma.  A  Protestant 
may  accept  and  even  amplify  the  ideas  suggested  by 
Scripture  about  the  Blessed  Virgin ;  but  he  may  feel 
that  he  cannot  tell  how  the  Redeemer  was  preserved 
from  sinful  taint ;  what  was  the  grace  bestowed  on 
His  mother ;  or  what  was  the  reward  and  prerogative 
which  ensued  to  her.  But  it  is  just  these  questions 
which  the  Roman  doctrine  undertakes  to  answer 
without  a  shadow  of  doubt,  and  which  Dr.  Newman 
implies  that  the  theology  of  the  Fathers  answered  as 
unambiguously. 

But  from  what  has  happened  in  the  history  of 
religion,  we  do  not  think  that  Protestants  in  general 
who  do  not  shrink  from  high  language  about  Abraham, 
Moses,  or  David,  would  find  anything  unnatural  or 


XXVII     DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"       425 

objectionable  in  the  language  of  the  early  Christian 
writers  about  the  Mother  of  our  Lord,  though  possibly 
it  might  not  be  their  own ;  but  the  interval  from  this 
language  to  that  certain  knowledge  of  her  present 
office  in  the  economy  of  grace  which  is  implied  in 
what  Dr.  Newman  considers  the  "doctrine"  about 
her  is  a  very  long  one.  The  step  to  the  modern 
"  devotion "  in  its  most  chastened  form  is  longer 
still.  We  cannot  follow  the  subtle  train  of  argument 
which  says  that  because  the  "  doctrine "  of  the 
second  century  called  her  the  "second  Eve,"  there- 
fore the  devotion  which  sets  her  upon  the  altars  of 
Christendom  in  the  nineteenth  is  a  right  develop- 
ment of  the  doctrine.  What  is  wanted  is  not  the 
internal  thread  of  the  process,  but  the  proof  and 
confirmation  from  without  that  it  was  the  right 
process ;  and  this  link  is  just  what  is  wanting,  except 
on  a  supposition  which  begs  the  question.  It  is 
conceivable  that  this  step  from  "  doctrine "  to 
"  devotion "  may  have  been  a  mistake.  It  is  con- 
ceivable that  the  "doctrine"  may  have  been  held 
in  the  highest  form  without  leading  to  the  devotion ; 
for  Dr.  Newman,  of  course,  thinks  that  Athanasius 
and  Augustine  held  "the  doctrine,"  yet,  as  he  says, 
"we  have  no  proof  that  Athanasius  himself  had  any 
special  devotion  to  the  Blessed  Virgin,"  and  in 
another  place  he  repeats  his  doubts  whether  St. 
Chrysostom  or  St.  Athanasius  invoked  her;  "nay," 
he  adds,  "  I  should  like  to  know  whether  St. 
Augustine,   in    all   his  voluminous  writings,   invokes 


426 

ner  once."  What  has  to  be  shown  is,  that  this  step 
was  not  a  mistake ;  that  it  was  inevitable  and 
legitimate. 

"This  being  the  faith  of  the  Fathers  about  the 
Blessed  Virgm,"  says  Dr.  Newman,  "we  need  not 
wonder  that  it  should  in  no  long  time  be  transmuted 
into  devotion."  The  Fathers  expressed  a  historical 
fact  about  her  in  the  term  SeoroKo^; ;  therefore, 
argues  the  later  view,  she  is  the  source  of  our  present 
grace  now.  It  is  the  rationale  of  this  inference,  which 
is  not  an  immediate  or  obvious  one,  which  is  wanted. 
And  Dr.  Newman  gives  it  us  in  the  words  of  Bishop 
Butler: — 

Christianity  is  eminently  an  objective  religion.  For 
the  most  part  it  tells  us  of  persons  and  facts  in  simple 
words,  and  leaves  the  announcement  to  produce  its  effect 
on  such  hearts  as  are  prepared  to  receive  it.  This,  at 
least,  is  its  general  character ;  and  Butler  recognises  it 
as  such  in  his  Analogy^  when  speaking  of  the  Second 
and  Third  Persons  of  the  Holy  Trinity  : — "  The  internal 
worship,"  he  says,  "  to  the  Son  and  Holy  Ghost  is  no 
farther  matter  of  pure  revealed  command  than  as  the 
relations  they  stand  in  to  us  are  matters  of  pure  revela- 
tion ;  but  the  relations  being  known,  the  obligations  to 
such  internal  worship  are  obligatioiis  of  reason  arising 
out  of  those  relations  themselves" 

We  acknowledge  the  pertinency  of  the  quotation. 
So  true  is  it  that  "the  relations  being  known,"  the 
obligations  of  worship  arise  of  themselves  from  these 
relations,  that  if  the  present  relation  of  the  Blessed 


XXVII     DR.  Js^EWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "      427 

Virgin  to  mankind  has  always  been  considered  to 
be  what  modern  Roman  theology  considers  it,  it  is 
simply  inconceivable  that  devotion  to  her  should 
not  have  been  universal  long  before  St.  Athanasius 
and  St.  Augustine;  and  equally  inconceivable,  to 
take  Dr.  Newman's  remarkable  illustration,  that  if 
the  real  position  of  St.  Joseph  is  next  to  her,  it 
should  have  been  reserved  for  the  nineteenth  century, 
if  not,  indeed,  to  find  it  out,  at  least  to  acknowledge 
it ;  but  the  whole  question  is  about  the  fact  of  the 
"  relations "  themselves.  If  we  believe  that  the 
Second  and  Third  Persons  are  God,  we  do  not  want 
to  be  told  to  worship  them.  But  such  a  relation  as 
Dr.  Newman  supposes  in  the  case  of  the  Blessed 
Virgin  does  not  flow  of  itself  from  the  idea  contained, 
for  instance,  in  the  word  ©eoroAro?,  and  even  if  it 
did,  we  should  still  want  to  be  told,  in  the  case  of  a 
creature,  and  remembering  the  known  jealousy  of 
religion  of  even  the  semblance  of  creature  worship, 
what  are  the  "rehgious  regards,"  which,  not  flowing 
from  the  nature  of  the  case,  but  needing  to  be  dis- 
tinctly authorised,  are  right  and  binding. 

The  question  is  of  a  dogmatic  and  a  popular 
system.  We  most  fully  admit  that,  with  Dr.  Newman 
or  any  other  of  the  numberless  well-trained  and  ex- 
cellent men  in  the  Roman  Church,  the  homage  to 
the  Mother  does  not  interfere  with  the  absolutely 
different  honour  rendered  to  the  Son.  We  readily 
acknowledge  the  elevating  and  refining  beauty  of 
that  character,  of  which   the  Virgin  Mother  is   the 


428      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "     xxvii 

type,  and  the  services  which  that  ideal  has  rendered 
to  mankind,  though  we  must  emphatically  say  that  a 
man  need  not  be  a  Roman  Catholic  to  feel  and  to 
express  the  charm  of  that  moral  beauty.  But  here 
we  have  a  doctrine  as  definite  and  precise  as  any 
doctrine  can  be,  and  a  great  system  of  popular 
devotion,  giving  a  character  to  a  great  religious 
communion.  Dr.  Newman  is  not  merely  develop- 
ing and  illustrating  an  idea:  he  is  asserting  a  definite 
revealed  fact  about  the  unseen  world,  and  defending 
its  consequences  in  a  very  concrete  and  practical 
shape.  And  the  real  point  is  what  proof  has  he 
given  us  that  this  is  a  revealed  fact ;  that  it  is  so, 
and  that  we  have  the  means  of  knowing  it?  He  has 
given  us  certain  language  of  the  early  writers,  which 
he  says  is  a  tradition,  though  it  is  only  what  any 
Protestant  might  have  been  led  to  by  reading  his 
Bible.  But  between  that  language,  taken  at  its 
highest,  and  the  belief  and  practice  which  his  Church 
maintains,  there  is  a  great  gap.  The  "Second  Eve," 
the  S6ot6ko<;,  are  names  of  high  dignity;  but  enlarge 
upon  them  as  we  may,  there  is  between  them  and  the 
modern  "  Regina  Coeli "  an  interval  which  nothing 
but  direct  divine  revelation  can  possibly  fill;  and  of 
this  divine  revelation  the  only  evidence  is  the  fact 
that  there  is  the  doctrine.  So  awful  and  central  an 
article  of  belief  needs  corresponding  proof  In  Dr. 
Newman's  eloquent  pages  we  have  much  collateral 
thought  on  the  subject — sometimes  instinct  with  his 
delicacy  of  perception  and  depth  of  feeling,  some- 


XXVII     DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "       429 

times  strangely  over-refined  and  irrelevant,  but  always 
fresh  and  instructive,  whether  to  teach  or  to  warn. 
The  one  thing  which  is  missing  in  them  is  direct 
proof. 

He  does  not  satisfy  us,  but  he  does  greatly  interest 
us  in  his  way  of  dealing  with  the  practical  con- 
sequences of  his  doctrine,  in  the  manifold  develop- 
ment of  devotion  in  his  communion.  What  he  tells 
us  reveals  two  things.  By  this  devotion  he  is  at 
once  greatly  attracted,  and  he  is  deeply  shocked. 
No  one  can  doubt  the  enthusiasm  with  which  he 
has  thrown  himself  into  that  devotion,  an  enthusiasm 
which,  if  it  w^as  at  one  time  more  vehement  and 
defiant  than  it  is  now,  is  still  a  most  intense  element 
in  his  religious  convictions.  Nor  do  we  feel  entitled 
to  say  that  in  him  it  interferes  with  religious  ideas  and 
feelings  of  a  higher  order,  which  we  are  accustomed 
to  suppose  imperilled  by  it.  It  leads  him,  indeed,  to 
say  things  which  astonish  us,  not  so  much  by  their 
extreme  language  as  by  the  absence,  as  it  seems  to 
us,  of  any  ground  to  say  them  at  all.  It  forces  him 
into  a  championship  for  statements,  in  defending 
which  the  utmost  that  can  be  done  is  to  frame 
ingenious  pleas,  or  to  send  back  a  vigorous  retort. 
It  tempts  him  at  times  to  depart  from  his  generally 
broad  and  fair  w^ay  of  viewing  things,  as  when  he 
meets  the  charge  that  the  Son  is  forgotten  for  the 
Mother,  not  merely  by  a  denial,  but  by  the  rejoinder 
that  when  the  Mother  is  not  honoured  as  the  Roman 
Church  honours  her  the  honour  of  the  Son  fails.     It 


430      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "     xxvii 

would  have  been  better  not  to  have  reprinted  the 
following  extract  from  a  former  work,  even  though  it 
were  singled  out  for  approval  by  the  late  Cardinal. 
The  italics  are  his  own  : — 

I  have  spoken  more  on  this  subject  in  my  Essay  on 
Development^  p.  438,  "Nor  does  it  avail  to  object  that, 
in  this  contrast  of  devotional  exercises,  the  human  is 
sure  to  supplant  the  Divine,  from  the  infirmity  of  our 
nature ;  for,  I  repeat,  the  question  is  one  of  fact,  whether 
it  has  done  so.  And  next,  it  must  be  asked,  whether  the 
character  of  Protestaftt  devotion  towards  Our  Lord  has 
beeji  that  of  worship  at  all;  and  not  rather  such  as  we 
pay  to  an  excellent  human  being.  .  .  .  Carnal  minds 
will  ever  create  a  carnal  worship  for  themselves,  and  to 
forbid  them  the  service  of  the  saints  will  have  no 
tendency  to  teach  them  the  worship  of  God.  More- 
over, .  .  .  great  and  constant  as  is  the  devotion  which 
the  Catholic  pays  to  St.  Mary,  it  has  a  special  province, 
and  has  far  more  comiectio7i  with  the  public  services 
and  the  festive  aspect  of  Christianity^  and  with  certain 
extraordinary  offices  which  she  holds,  thaji  with  what  is 
strictly  personal  and  primary  in  religion.^''  Our  late 
Cardinal,  on  my  reception,  singled  out  to  me  this  last 
sentence,  for  the  expression  of  his  especial  approbation. 

Can  Dr.  Newman  defend  the  first  of  these  two 
assertions,  when  he  remembers  such  books  of  popular 
Protestant  devotion  as  Wesley's  Hymns,  or  the 
German  hymn-books  of  which  we  have  examples 
in  the  well-known  Lyra  Ger?namca  ?  Can  he  deny 
the  second  when  he  remembers  the  exercises  of  the 


XXVII     DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"      431 

"  Mois  de  Marie  "  in  French  churches,  or  if  he  has 
heard  a  fervid  and  earnest  preacher  at  the  end  of 
them  urge  on  a  church  full  of  young  people,  fresh 
from  Confirmation  and  first  Communion,  a  special  and 
personal  self- dedication  to  the  great  patroness  for 
protection  amid  the  daily  trials  of  life,  in  much  the 
same  terms  as  in  an  English  Church  they  might  be 
exhorted  to  commit  themselves  to  the  Redeemer  of 
mankind  ?  Right  or  wrong,  such  devotion  is  not  a 
matter  of  the  "festive  aspect"  of  religion,  but  most 
eminently  of  what  is  "personal  and  primary"  in  it; 
and  surely  of  such  a  character  is  a  vast  proportion  of 
the  popular  devotion  here  spoken  of. 

But  for  himself,  no  doubt,  he  has  accepted  this 
cultus  on  its  most  elevated  and  refined  side.  He 
himself  makes  the  distinction,  and  says  that  there  is 
"  a  healthy  "  and  an  "  artificial  "  form  of  it ;  a  devotion 
which  does  not  shock  "solid  piety  and  Christian 
good  sense ;  I  cannot  help  calling  this  the  English 
style."  And  when  other  sides  are  presented  to  him, 
he  feels  what  any  educated  Englishman  who  allows 
his  English  feelings  play  is  apt  to  feel  about  them. 
What  is  more,  he  has  the  boldness  to  say  so.  He 
makes  all  kinds  of  reserves  to  save  the  credit  of  those 
with  whom  he  cannot  sympathise.  He  speaks  of 
the  privileges  of  Saints ;  the  peculiarities  of  national 
temperament ;  the  distinctions  between  popular 
language  and  that  used  by  scholastic  writers,  or 
otherwise  marked  by  circumstances ;  the  special 
characters  of  some  of  the  writers  quoted,  their  "  ruth- 


432      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "EIRENICON"      xxvii 

less  logic,"  or  their  obscurity ;  the  inculpated  passages 
are  but  few  and  scattered  in  proportion  to  their  con- 
text ;  they  are  harsh,  but  sound  worse  than  they 
mean  ;  they  are  hardly  interpreted  and  pressed.  He 
reminds  Dr.  Pusey  that  there  is  not  much  to  choose 
between  the  Oriental  Churches  and  Rome  on  this 
point,  and  that  of  the  two  the  language  of  the  Eastern 
is  the  most  florid,  luxuriant,  and  unguarded.  But, 
after  all,  the  true  feeling  comes  out  at  last,  "And 
now,  at  length,"  he  says,  "coming  to  the  statements, 
not  English,  but  foreign,  which  offend  you,  I  will 
frankly  say  that  I  read  some  of  those  which  you 
quote  with  grief  and  almost  anger."  They  are  "per- 
verse sayings,"  which  he  hates.  He  fills  a  page  and 
a  half  with  a  number  of  them,  and  then  deliberately 
pronounces  his  rejection  of  them. 

After  such  explanations,  and  with  such  authorities  to 
clear  my  path,  I  put  away  from  me  as  you  would  wish, 
without  any  hesitation,  as  matters  in  which  my  heart  and 
reason  have  no  part  (when  taken  in  their  literal  and 
absolute  sense,  as  any  Protestant  would  naturally  take 
them,  and  as  the  writers  doubtless  did  not  use  them), 
such  sentences  and  phrases  as  these  : — that  the  mercy  of 
Mary  is  infinite,  that  God  has  resigned  into  her  hands 
His  omnipotence,  that  (unconditionally)  it  is  safer  to 
seek  her  than  her  Son,  that  the  Blessed  Virgin  is  superior 
to  God,  that  He  is  (simply)  subject  to  her  command,  that 
our  Lord  is  now  of  the  same  disposition  as  His  Father 
towards  sinners — viz.  a  disposition  to  reject  them,  while 
Mary  takes  His  place  as  an  Advocate  with  the  Father 
and  Son  ;  that  the  Saints  are  more  ready  to  intercede 


XXVII      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "       433 

with  Jesus  than  Jesus  with  the  Father,  that  Mary  is  the 
only  refuge  of  those  with  whom  God  is  angry  ;  that  Mary 
alone  can  obtain  a  Protestant's  conversion  ;  that  it  would 
have  sufficed  for  the  salvation  of  men  if  our  Lord  had 
died,  not  to  obey  His  Father,  but  to  defer  to  the  decree 
of  His  Mother,  that  she  rivals  our  Lord  in  being  God's 
daughter,  not  by  adoption,  but  by  a  kind  of  nature  ;  that 
Christ  fulfilled  the  office  of  Saviour  by  imitating  her 
virtues  ;  that,  as  the  Incarnate  God  bore  the  image  of 
His  Father,  so  He  bore  the  image  of  His  Mother ;  that 
redemption  derived  from  Christ  indeed  its  sufficiency, 
but  from  Mary  its  beauty  and  loveliness  ;  that  as  we  are 
clothed  with  the  merits  of  Christ  so  we  are  clothed  with 
the  merits  of  Mary  ;  that,  as  He  is  Priest,  in  like  manner 
is  she  Priestess  ;  that  His  body  and  blood  in  the  Eucharist 
are  truly  hers,  and  appertain  to  her;  that  as  He  is 
present  and  received  therein,  so  is  she  present  and 
received  therein  ;  that  Priests  are  ministers  as  of  Christ, 
so  of  Mary  ;  that  elect  souls  are  born  of  God  and  Mary; 
that  the  Holy  Ghost  brings  into  fruitfulness  His  action 
by  her,  producing  in  her  and  by  her  Jesus  Christ  in  His 
members  ;  that  the  kingdom  of  God  in  our  souls,  as  our 
Lord  speaks,  is  really  the  kingdom  of  Mary  in  the  soul 
— and  she  and  the  Holy  Ghost  produce  in  the  soul 
extraordinary  things — and  when  the  Holy  Ghost  finds 
Mary  in  a  soul  He  flies  there. 

Sentiments  such  as  these  I  never  knew  of  till  I 
read  your  book,  nor,  as  I  think,  do  the  vast  majority 
of  English  Catholics  know  them.  They  seem  to 
me  like  a  bad  dream.  I  could  not  have  conceived 
them  to  be  said.  I  know  not  to  what  authority  to 
go  for  them,  to   Scripture,  or  to  the   Fathers,  or  to  the 

VOL.  II  2  F 


434      DR.  N'EWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "      xxvii 

decrees  of  Councils,  or  to  the  consent  of  schools,  or  to  the 
tradition  of  the  faithful,  or  to  the  Holy  See,  or  to  Reason. 
They  defy  all  the  loci  theologici.  There  is  nothing  of 
them  in  the  Missal,  in  the  Roman  Catechism,  in  the 
Roman  Raccolfa,  in  the  Imitation  of  Christ,  in  Gother, 
Challoner,  Milner,  or  Wiseman,  so  far  as  I  am  aware. 
They  do  but  scare  and  confuse  me.  I  should  not  be 
holier,  more  spiritual,  more  sure  of  perseverance,  if  I 
twisted  my  moral  being  into  the  reception  of  them  ;  I 
should  but  be  guilty  of  fulsome  frigid  flattery  towards 
the  most  upright  and  noble  of  God's  creatures  if  I 
professed  them — and  of  stupid  flattery  too  ;  for  it  would 
be  like  the  compliment  of  painting  up  a  young  and 
beautiful  princess  with  the  brow  of  a  Plato  and  the 
muscle  of  an  Achilles.  And  I  should  expect  her  to  tell 
one  of  her  people  in  waiting  to  turn  me  off  her  service 
without  warning.  Whether  thus  to  feel  be  the  scanda- 
him  paruuloru7Ji  in  my  case,  or  the  scandahwi  Pharisae- 
oriim^  I  leave  others  to  decide  ;  but  I  will  say  plainly 
that  I  had  rather  believe  (which  is  impossible)  that  there 
is  no  God  at  all,  than  that  Mary  is  greater  than  God. 
I  will  have  nothing  to  do  with  statements,  which  can 
only  be  explained  by  being  explained  away.  I  do  not, 
however,  speak  of  these  statements,  as  they  are  found 
in  their  authors,  for  I  know  nothing  of  the  originals,  and 
cannot  believe  that  they  have  meant  what  you  say  ;  but 
I  take  them  as  they  lie  in  your  pages.  Were  any  of 
them  the  sayings  of  Saints  in  ecstasy,  I  should  know 
they  had  a  good  meaning  ;  still  I  should  not  repeat  them 
myself;  but  I  am  looking  at  them,  not  as  spoken  by  the 
tongues  of  Angels,  but  according  to  that  literal  sense 
which    they  bear    in    the    mouths    of  English   men   and 


XXVII      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EmENICON  "      435 

English  women.  And,  as  spoken  by  man  to  man  in 
England  in  the  nineteenth  century,  I  consider  them  cal- 
culated to  prejudice  inquirers,  to  frighten  the  unlearned, 
to  unsettle  consciences,  to  provoke  blasphemy,  and  to 
work  the  loss  of  souls. 

Of  course ;  it  is  what  might  be  expected  of  him. 
But  Dr.  Newman  has  often  told  us  that  we  must  take 
the  consequences  of  our  principles  and  theories,  and 
here  are  some  of  the  consequences  which  meet  him ; 
and,  as  he  says,  they  "scare  and  confuse  him."  He 
boldly  disavows  them  with  no  doubtful  indignation. 
But  what  other  voice  but  his,  of  equal  authority  and 
weight,  has  been  lifted  up  to  speak  the  plain  truth 
about  them  ?  Why,  if  they  are  wrong,  extravagant, 
dangerous,  is  his  protest  solitary?  His  communion 
has  never  been  wanting  in  jealousy  of  dangerous 
doctrines,  and  it  is  vain  to  urge  that  these  things  and 
things  like  them  have  been  said  in  a  corner.  The 
Holy  Office  is  apt  to  detect  mischief  in  small  writers 
as  well  as  great,  even  if  these  teachers  were  as 
insignificant  as  Dr.  Newman  would  gladly  make 
them.  Taken  as  a  whole,  and  in  connection  with 
notorious  facts,  these  statements  are  fair  examples  of 
manifest  tendencies,  which  certainly  are  not  on  the 
decline.  And  if  a  great  and  spreading  popular  cultus, 
encouraged  and  urged  on  beyond  all  former  precedent, 
is  in  danger  of  being  developed  by  its  warmest  and 
most  confident  advocates  into  something  of  which 
unreason  is  the  lightest  fault,  is  there  not  ground  for 
interfering  ?    Doubtless  Roman  writers  may  be  quoted 


436       DR.  XEWMAX  OX  THE  "  EIREXICOX  "      xxvii 

by  Dr.  Newman,  who  felt  that  there  was  a  danger, 
and  we  are  vaguely  told  about  some  checks  given  to 
one  or  two  isolated  extravagances,  which,  however, 
in  spite  of  the  checks,  do  not  seem  to  be  yet  extinct. 
But  Allocutions  and  Encyclicals  are  not  for  errors  of 
this  kind.  Dr.  Newman  says  that  "it  is  wiser  for  the 
most  part  to  leave  these  excesses  to  the  gradual 
operation  of  public  opinion, — that  is,  to  the  opinion 
of  educated  and  sober  Catholics ;  and  this  seems  to 
me  the  healthiest  way  of  putting  them  down."  We 
quite  agree  with  him ;  but  his  own  Church  does  not 
think  so ;  and  we  want  to  see  some  evidence  of  a 
public  opinion  in  it  capable  of  putting  them  down. 
As  it  is,  he  is  reduced  to  say  that  "  the  line  cannot 
be  logically  drawn  between  the  teaching  of  the  Fathers 
on  the  subject  and  our  own ; "  an  assertion  which,  if 
it  were  true,  would  be  more  likely  to  drag  down  one 
teaching  than  to  prop  up  the  other ;  he  has  to  find 
reasons,  and  doubtless  they  are  to  be  found  thick  as 
blackberries,  for  accounting  for  one  extravagance, 
softening  down  another,  declining  to  judge  a  third. 
But  in  the  meantime  the  "devotion"  in  its  extreme 
form,  far  beyond  what  he  would  call  the  teaching  of 
his  Church,  has  its  way ;  it  maintains  its  ground ;  it 
becomes  the  mark  of  the  bold,  the  advanced,  the 
refined,  as  well  as  of  the  submissive  and  the  crowd ; 
it  roots  itself  under  the  shelter  of  an  authority  which 
would  stop  it  if  it  was  wrong ;  it  becomes  "  domi- 
nant"; it  becomes  at  length  part  of  that  "mind 
of    the    living    Church "    which,   we    are   told,  it  is 


XXVII      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "       437 

heresy  to  impugn,  treason  to  appeal  from,  and 
the  extravagance  of  impertinent  folly  to  talk  of  re- 
forming. 

It  is  very  little  use,  then,  for  Dr.  Newman  to  tell 
Dr.  Pusey  or  any  one  else,  "You  may  safely  trust  us 
English  Catholics  as  to  this  devotion."  "English 
Catholics,"  as  such, — it  is  the  strength  and  the  weak- 
ness of  their  system, — have  really  the  least  to  say  in 
the  matter.  The  question  is  not  about  trusting  "us 
English  Catholics,"  but  the  Pope,  and  the  Roman 
Congregation,  and  those  to  whom  the  Roman 
authorities  delegate  their  sanction  and  give  their 
countenance.  If  Dr.  Newman  is  able,  as  we  doubt 
not  he  is  desirous,  to  elevate  the  tone  of  his  own 
communion  and  put  to  shame  some  of  its  fashionable 
excesses,  he  will  do  a  great  work,  in  which  we  wish 
him  every  success,  though  the  result  of  it  might  not 
really  be  to  bring  the  body  of  his  countrymen  nearer 
to  it.  But  the  substance  of  Dr.  Pusey's  charges 
remain  after  all  unanswered,  and  there  is  no  getting 
over  them  while  they  remain.  They  are  of  that 
broad,  palpable  kind  against  which  the  refinements 
of  argumentative  apology  play  in  vain.  They  can 
only  be  met  by  those  who  feel  their  force,  on  some 
principle  equally  broad.  Dr.  Newman  suggests  such 
a  ground  in  the  following  remarks,  which,  much  as 
they  want  qualification  and  precision,  have  a  basis 
of  reality  in  them  : — 

It  is  impossible,  I  say,  in  a  doctrine  like  this,  to  draw 
the  line  cleanly  between  truth  and  error,  right  and  wrong. 


438       DR.  NEWMAN  OX  THE  "EIRENICON"      xxvii 

This  is  ever  the  case  in  concrete  matters  which  have 
life.  Life  in  this  world  is  motion,  and  involves  a  con- 
tinual process  of  change.  Living  things  grow  into 
their  perfection,  into  their  decline,  into  their  death.  No 
rule  of  art  will  suffice  to  stop  the  operation  of  this  natural 
law,  whether  in  the  material  world  or  in  the  human 
mind.  .  .  .  What  has  power  to  stir  holy  and  refined 
souls  is  potent  also  with  the  multitude,  and  the  religion 
of  the  multitude  is  ever  vulgar  and  abnormal ;  it  ever 
will  be  tinctured  with  fanaticism  and  superstition  while 
men  are  what  they  are.  A  people's  religion  is  ever  a 
corrupt  religion.  If  you  are  to  have  a  Catholic  Church 
you  must  put  up  with  fish  of  every  kind,  guests  good  and 
bad,  vessels  of  gold,  vessels  of  earth.  You  may  beat 
religion  out  of  men,  if  you  will,  and  then  their  excesses 
will  take  a  different  direction  ;  but  if  you  make  use  of 
religion  to  improve  them,  they  will  make  use  of  religion 
to  corrupt  it.  And  then  you  will  have  effected  that 
compromise  of  which  our  countrymen  report  so  un- 
favourably from  abroad, — a  high  grand  faith  and  worship 
which  compels  their  admiration,  and  puerile  absurdities 
among  the  people  which  excite  their  contempt. 

It  is  like  Dr.  Newman  to  put  his  case  in  this  broad 
way,  making  large  admissions,  allowing  for  much  in- 
evitable failure.  That  is,  he  defends  his  Church  as 
he  would  defend  Christianity  generally,  taking  it  as  a 
great  practical  system  must  be  in  this  world,  working 
with  human  nature  as  it  is.  His  reflection  is,  no 
doubt,  one  suggested  by  a  survey  of  the  cause  of 
all  religion.  The  coming  short  of  the  greatest  pro- 
mises,   the   debasement   of  the   noblest   ideals,   are 


XXVII      DR.  NEWMAN  ON  THE  "  EIRENICON  "       439 

among  the  commonplaces  of  history.  Christianity 
cannot  be  maintained  without  ample  admissions  of 
failure  and  perversion.  But  it  is  one  thing  to  make 
this  admission  for  Christianity  generally,  an  admission 
which  the  New  Testament  in  foretelling  its  fortunes 
gives  us  abundant  ground  for  making;  and  quite 
another  for  those  who  maintain  the  superiority  of 
one  form  of  Christianity  above  all  others,  to  claim 
that  they  may  leave  out  of  the  account  its  character- 
istic faults.  It  is  quite  true  that  all  sides  abundantly 
need  to  appeal  for  considerate  judgment  to  the 
known  infirmity  of  human  nature ;  but  amid  the 
conflicting  pretensions  which  divide  Christendom  no 
one  side  can  ask  to  have  for  itself  the  exclusive 
advantage  of  this  plea.  All  may  claim  the  benefit  of 
it,  but  if  it  is  denied  to  any  it  must  be  denied  to  all. 
In  this  confused  and  imperfect  world  other  great 
popular  systems  of  religion  besides  the  Roman  may 
use  it  in  behalf  of  shortcomings,  which,  though  per- 
haps very  different,  are  yet  not  worse.  It  is  obvious 
that  the  theory  of  great  and  living  ideas,  working 
with  a  double  edge,  and  working  for  mischief  at  last, 
holds  good  for  other  things  besides  the  special  instance 
on  which  Dr.  Newman  comments.  It  is  to  be  further 
observed  that  to  claim  the  benefit  of  this  plea  is  to 
make  the  admission  that  you  come  under  the  common 
law  of  human  nature  as  to  mistake,  perversion,  and 
miscarriage,  and  this  in  the  matter  of  religious  guid- 
ance the  Roman  theory  refuses  to  do.  It  claims  for 
its  communion  as  its  special  privilege  an  exemption 


440      DR.  NEWMAX  OX  THE  "EIRENICON"      xxvii 

from  those  causes  of  corruption  of  which  history  is 
the  inexorable  witness,  and  to  which  others  admit 
themselves  to  be  liable;  an  immunity  from  going 
wrong,  a  supernatural  exception  from  the  common 
tendency  of  mankind  to  be  led  astray,  from  the  com- 
mon necessity  to  correct  and  reform  themselves  when 
they  are  proved  wrong.  How  far  this  is  realised,  not 
on  paper  and  in  argument,  but  in  fact,  is  indeed  one 
of  the  most  important  questions  for  the  world,  and  it 
is  one  to  which  the  world  will  pay  more  heed  than  to 
the  best  writing  about  it.  There  are  not  wanting 
signs,  among  others  of  a  very  different  character,  of 
an  honest  and  philosophical  recognition  of  this  by 
some  of  the  ablest  writers  of  the  Roman  communion. 
The  day  on  which  the  Roman  Church  ceases  to 
maintain  that  what  it  holds  must  be  truth  because  it 
holds  it,  and  admits  itself  subject  to  the  common  con- 
dition by  which  God  has  given  truth  to  men,  will  be 
the  first  hopeful  day  for  the  reunion  of  Christendom. 


XXVIII 

NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS  ^ 

Dr.  Newman's  Sermons  stand  by  themselves  in 
modern  English  literature ;  it  might  be  said,  in 
English  literature  generally.  There  have  been  equally 
great  masterpieces  of  English  writing  in  this  form  of 
composition,  and  there  have  been  preachers  whose 
theological  depth,  acquaintance  with  the  heart, 
earnestness,  tenderness,  and  power  have  not  been 
inferior  to  his.  But  the  great  writers  do  not  touch, 
pierce,  and  get  hold  of  minds  as  he  does,  and  those 
who  are  famous  for  the  power  and  results  of  their 
preaching  do  not  write  as  he  does.  His  sermons 
have  done  more  perhaps  than  any  one  thing  to  mould 
and  quicken  and  brace  the  religious  temper  of  our 
time ;  they  have  acted  with  equal  force  on  those  who 
were  nearest  and  on  those  who  were  farthest  from  him 
in  theological  opinion.  They  have  altered  the  whole 
manner  of  feeling  towards    religious    subjects.     We 

^  Parochial  and  Plain  Sermons.  By  John  Henry  Newman, 
B.D. ,  formerly  Vicar  of  St.  Mary's,  Oxford.  Edited  by  W.  J. 
CopeUnd,  B.D.      Saturday  Review,  5th  June  1869, 


442  NEWMAN'S  TAROCHIAL  SERMONS        xxviii 

know  now  that  they  were  the  beginning,  the  signal 
and  first  heave,  of  a  vast  change  that  was  to  come 
over  the  subject;  of  a  demand  from  religion  of  a 
thoroughgoing  reality  of  meaning  and  fulfilment, 
which  is  familiar  to  us,  but  was  new  when  it  was  first 
made.  And,  being  this,  these  sermons  are  also 
among  the  very  finest  examples  of  what  the  English 
language  of  our  day  has  done  in  the  hands  of  a 
master.  Sermons  of  such  intense  conviction  and 
directness  of  purpose,  combined  with  such  originality 
and  perfection  on  their  purely  literary  side,  are  rare 
everywhere.  Remarkable  instances,  of  course,  will 
occur  to  every  one  of  the  occasiunal  exhibition  of  this 
combination,  but  not  in  so  sustained  and  varied 
and  unfailing  a  way.  Between  Dr.  Newman  and  the 
great  French  school  there  is  this  difference — that  they 
are  orators,  and  he  is  as  far  as  anything  can  be  in  a 
great  preacher  from  an  orator.  Those  who  remember 
the  tones  and  the  voice  in  which  the  sermons  were 
heard  at  St.  Mary's — we  may  refer  to  Professor 
Shairp's  striking  account  in  his  volume  on  Keble,  and 
to  a  recent  article  in  the  Dublm  Review — can  re- 
member how  utterly  unlike  an  orator  in  all  outward 
ways  was  the  speaker  who  so  strangely  moved  them. 
The  notion  of  judging  of  Dr.  Newman  as  an  orator 
never  crossed  their  minds.  And  this  puts  a  difference 
between  him  and  a  remarkable  person  whose  name 
has  sometimes  been  joined  with  his — Mr.  F.  Robert- 
son. Mr.  Robertson  was  a  great  preacher,  but  he  was 
not  a  writer. 


XXVIII       NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS  443 

It  is  difficult  to  realise  at  present  the  effect  pro- 
duced originally  by  these  sermons.  The  first  feeling 
was  that  of  their  difference  in  manner  from  the  custom- 
ary sermon.  People  knew  what  an  eloquent  sermon 
was,  or  a  learned  sermon,  or  a  philosophical  sermon, 
or  a  sermon  full  of  doctrine  or  pious  unction. 
Chalmers  and  Edward  Irving  and  Robert  Hall  were 
familiar  names ;  the  University  pulpit  and  some  of 
the  London  churches  had  produced  examples  of 
forcible  argument  and  severe  and  finished  composi- 
tion ;  and  of  course  instances  were  abundant  every- 
where of  the  good,  sensible,  commonplace  discourse ; 
of  all  that  was  heavy,  dull,  and  dry,  and  of  all  that 
was  ignorant,  wild,  fanatical,  and  irrational.  But  no 
one  seemed  to  be  able,  or  to  be  expected,  unless  he 
avowedly  took  the  buffoonery  line  which  some  of  the 
Evangelical  preachers  affected,  to  speak  in  the  pulpit 
with  the  directness  and  straightforward  unconvention- 
ality  with  which  men  speak  on  the  practical  business 
of  life.  With  all  the  thought  and  vigour  and  many 
beauties  which  were  in  the  best  sermons,  there  was 
always  something  forced,  formal,  artificial  about  them ; 
something  akin  to  that  mild  pomp  which  usually 
attended  their  delivery,  with  beadles  in  gowns  usher- 
ing the  preacher  to  the  carpeted  pulpit  steps,  with 
velvet  cushions,  and  with  the  rustle  and  fulness  of  his 
robes.  No  one  seemed  to  think  of  writing  a  sermon 
as  he  would  write  an  earnest  letter.  A  preacher  must 
approach  his  subject  in  a  kind  of  roundabout  make- 
believe  of  preliminary  and  preparatory  steps,  as  if  he  was 


444  NEWMAN'S  PAROCPIIAL  SERMONS       xxviii 

introducing  his  hearers  to  what  they  had  never  heard 
of;  make-beheve  difficulties  and  objections  were 
overthrown  by  make-believe  answers ;  an  unnatural 
position  both  in  speaker  and  hearers,  an  unreal  state 
of  feeling  and  view  of  facts,  a  systematic  conventional 
exaggeration,  seemed  almost  impossible  to  be  avoided; 
and  those  who  tried  to  escape  being  laboured  and 
grandiloquent  only  escaped  it,  for  the  most  part,  by 
being  vulgar  or  slovenly.  The  strong  severe  thinkers, 
jealous  for  accuracy,  and  loathing  clap-trap  as  they 
loathed  loose  argument,  addressed  and  influenced  in- 
telligence ;  but  sermons  are  meant  for  heart  and 
souls  as  well  as  minds,  and  to  the  heart,  with  its  trials 
and  its  burdens,  men  like  Whately  never  found  their 
way.  Those  who  remember  the  preaching  of  those 
days,  before  it  began  to  be  influenced  by  the  sermons 
at  St.  Mary's,  will  call  to  mind  much  that  was  interest- 
ing, much  that  was  ingenious,  much  correction  of  in- 
accurate and  confused  views,  much  manly  encourage- 
ment to  high  principle  and  duty,  much  of  refined  and 
scholarlike  writing.  But  for  soul  and  warmth,  and  the 
imaginative  and  poetical  side  of  the  religious  life,  you 
had  to  go  where  thought  and  good  sense  were  not 
likely  to  be  satisfied. 

The  contrast  of  Mr.  Newman's  preaching  was 
not  obvious  at  first.  The  outside  form  and  look 
was  very  much  that  of  the  regular  best  Oxford 
type — calm,  clear,  and  lucid  in  expression,  strong 
in  its  grasp,  measured  in  statement,  and  far  too 
serious   to   think   of  rhetorical  ornament.      But  by 


XXVIII        NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS  445 

degrees  much  more  opened.  The  range  of  experi- 
ence from  which  the  preacher  drew  his  materials, 
and  to  which  he  appealed,  was  something  wider, 
subtler,  and  more  delicate  than  had  been  commonly 
dealt  with  in  sermons.  With  his  strong,  easy,  exact, 
elastic  language,  the  instrument  of  a  powerful  and 
argumentative  mind,  he  plunged  into  the  deep 
realities  of  the  inmost  spiritual  Hfe,  of  which  cultivated 
preachers  had  been  shy.  He  preached  so  that  he 
made  you  feel  without  doubt  that  it  was  the  most 
real  of  worlds  to  him ;  he  made  you  feel  in  time,  in 
spite  of  yourself,  that  it  was  a  real  world  with  which 
you  too  had  concern.  He  made  you  feel  that  he 
knew  what  he  was  speaking  about ;  that  his  reason- 
ings and  appeals,  whether  you  agreed  with  them  or 
not,  were  not  the  language  of  that  heated  enthusiasm 
with  which  the  world  is  so  familiar;  that  he  was 
speaking  words  which  were  the  result  of  intellectual 
scrutiny,  balancings,  and  decisions,  as  well  as  of  moral 
trials,  of  conflicts  and  suffering  within ;  words  of  the 
utmost  soberness  belonging  to  deeply  gauged  and 
earnestly  formed  purposes.  The  effect  of  his  sermons, 
as  compared  with  the  common  run  at  the  time,  was 
something  like  what  happens  when  in  a  company  you 
have  a  number  of  people  giving  their  views  and 
answers  about  some  question  before  them.  You 
have  opinions  given  of  various  worth  and  expressed 
with  varying  power,  precision,  and  distinctness,  some 
clever  enough,  some  clumsy  enough,  but  all  more  or 
less  imperfect  and  unattractive  in  tone,  and  more  or 


446  NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS       xxviii 

less  falling  short  of  their  aim ;  and  then,  after  it  all, 
comes  a  voice,  very  grave,  very  sweet,  very  sure  and 
clear,  under  whose  words  the  discussion  springs  up 
at  once  to  a  higher  level,  and  in  which  we  recognise 
at  once  a  mind,  face  to  face  with  realities,  and  able 
to  seize  them  and  hold  them  fast. 

The  first  notable  feature  in  the  external  form  of 
this  preaching  was  its  terse  unceremonious  directness. 
Putting  aside  the  verbiage  and  dulled  circumlocution 
and  stiff  hazy  phraseology  of  pulpit  etiquette  and 
dignity,  it  went  straight  to  its  point.  There  was  no 
waste  of  time  about  customary  formalities.  The 
preacher  had  something  to  say,  and  with  a  kind  of 
austere  severity  he  proceeded  to  say  it.  This,  for 
instance,  is  the  sort  of  way  in  which  a  sermon  would 
begin : — 

Hypocrisy  is  a  serious  word.  We  are  accustomed  to 
consider  the  hypocrite  as  a  hateful,  despicable  character, 
and  an  uncommon  one.  How  is  it,  then,  that  our 
Blessed  Lord,  when  surrounded  by  an  innumerable  mul- 
titude, began,  yfrj-/  of  all^  to  warn  His  disciples  against 
hypocrisy,  as  though  they  were  in  especial  danger  of  be- 
coming like  those  base  deceivers  the  Pharisees  ?  Thus 
an  instructive  subject  is  opened  to  our  consideration, 
which  I  will  now  pursue. — Vol.  I.  Serm.  X. 

The  next  thing  was  that,  instead  of  rambling  and 
straggling  over  a  large  subject,  each  sermon  seized  a 
single  thought,  or  definite  view,  or  real  difficulty  or 
objection,  and  kept  closely  and  distinctly  to  it ;  and 
at   the  same   time  treated  it  with  a  largeness  and 


XXVIII       NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS  447 

grasp  and  ease  which  only  a  full  command  over  much 
beyond  it  could  give.  Every  sermon  had  a  purpose 
and  an  end  which  no  one  could  misunderstand. 
Singularly  devoid  of  anything  like  excitement — calm, 
even,  self-controlled — there  was  something  in  the 
preacher's  resolute  concentrated  way  of  getting  hold 
of  a  single  defined  object  which  reminded  you  of  the 
rapid  spring  or  unerring  swoop  of  some  strong-limbed 
or  swift-winged  creature  on  its  quarry.  Whatever  you 
might  think  that  he  did  with  it,  or  even  if  it  seemed 
to  escape  from  him,  you  could  have  no  doubt  what  he 
sought  to  do ;  there  was  no  wavering,  confused,  uncer- 
tain bungling  in  that  powerful  and  steady  hand.  An- 
other feature  was  the  character  of  the  writer's  English. 
We  have  learned  to  look  upon  Dr.  Newman  as  one  of 
the  half-dozen  or  so  of  the  innumerable  good  writers  of 
the  time  who  have  fairly  left  their  mark  as  masters  on 
the  language.  Little,  assuredly,  as  the  writer  origin- 
ally thought  of  such  a  result,  the  sermons  have 
proved  a  permanent  gift  to  our  literature,  of  the 
purest  English,  full  of  spring,  clearness,  and  force.  A 
hasty  reader  would  perhaps  at  first  only  notice  a  very 
light,  strong,  easy  touch,  and  might  think,  too,  that 
it  was  a  negligent  one.  But  it  was  not  negligence ; 
real  negligence  means  at  bottom  bad  work,  and  bad 
work  will  not  stand  the  trial  of  time.  There  are  two 
great  styles — the  self-conscious,  like  that  of  Gibbon 
or  Macaulay,  where  great  success  in  expression  is  ac- 
companied by  an  unceasing  and  manifest  vigilance 
that  expression  shall  succeed,  and  where  you  see  at 


448  NEWMAN'S  i'AROCHIAL  SERMONS        xxviii 

each  step  that  there  is  or  has  been  much  care  and 
work  in  the  mind,  if  not  on  the  paper;  and  the 
unconscious,  Uke  that  of  Pascal  or  Swift  or  Hume, 
where  nothing  suggests  at  the  moment  that  the 
writer  is  thinking  of  anything  but  his  subject,  and 
where  the  power  of  being  able  to  say  just  what  he 
wants  to  say  seems  to  come  at  the  writer's  command, 
without  effort,  and  without  his  troubUng  himself  more 
about  it  than  about  the  way  in  which  he  holds  his 
pen.  But  both  are  equally  the  fruit  of  hard  labour 
and  honest  persevering  self  -  correction ;  and  it  is 
soon  found  out  whether  the  apparent  negligence 
comes  of  loose  and  slovenly  habits  of  mind,  or 
whether  it  marks  the  confidence  of  one  who  has 
mastered  his  instrument,  and  can  forget  himself  and 
let  himself  go  in  using  it.  The  free  unconstrained 
movement  of  Dr.  Newman's  style  tells  any  one  who 
knows  what  writing  is  of  a  very  keen  and  exact 
knowledge  of  the  subtle  and  refined  secrets  of 
language.  With  all  that  uncared-for  play  and  sim- 
plicity, there  was  a  fulness,  a  richness,  a  curious 
delicate  music,  quite  instinctive  and  unsought  for; 
above  all,  a  precision  and  sureness  of  expression 
which  people  soon  began  to  find  were  not  within  the 
power  of  most  of  those  who  tried  to  use  language. 
Such  English,  graceful  with  the  grace  of  nerve,  flexi- 
bility, and  power,  must  always  have  attracted  atten- 
tion ;  but  it  had  also  an  ethical  element  which  was 
almost  inseparable  from  its  literary  characteristics. 
Two  things  powerfully  determined  the  style  of  these 


xxYiii       NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS  449 

sermons.  One  was  the  intense  hold  which  the  vast 
realities  of  religion  had  gained  on  the  writer's  mind, 
and  the  perfect  truth  with  which  his  personality  sank 
and  faded  away  before  their  overwhelming  presence ; 
the  other  was  the  strong  instinctive  shrinking,  which 
was  one  of  the  most  remarkable  and  certain  marks  of 
the  beginners  of  the  Oxford  movement,  from  anything 
like  personal  display,  any  conscious  aiming  at  the 
ornamental  and  brilliant,  any  show  of  gifts  or  court- 
ing of  popular  applause.  Morbid  and  excessive  or 
not,  there  can  be  no  doubt  of  the  stern  self-contain- 
ing severity  which  made  them  turn  away,  not  only 
with  fear,  but  with  distaste  and  repugnance,  from  all 
that  implied  distinction  or  seemed  to  lead  to  honour ; 
and  the  control  of  this  austere  spirit  is  visible,  in 
language  as  well  as  matter,  in  every  page  of  Dr.  New- 
man's sermons. 

Indeed,  form  and  matter  are  closely  connected  in 
the  sermons,  and  depend  one  on  another,  as  they 
probably  do  in  all  work  of  a  high  order.  The  matter 
makes  and  shapes  the  form  with  which  it  clothes 
itself.  The  obvious  thing  which  presents  itself  in 
reading  them  is  that,  from  first  to  last,  they  are  a 
great  systematic  attempt  to  raise  the  whole  level  of 
religious  thought  and  religious  life.  They  carry  in 
them  the  evidence  of  a  great  reaction  and  a  scornful 
indignant  rising  up  against  what  were  going  about  and 
were  currently  received  as  adequate  ideas  of  religion. 
The  dryness  and  primness  and  meagreness  of  the 
common  Church  preaching,  correct  as  it  was  in  its 

VOL.  II  2  G 


450  NEWMAN'S  TAROCHIAL  SERMONS        xxviii 

outlines  of  doctrine,  and  sober  and  temperate  in  tone, 
struck  cold  on  a  mind  which  had  caught  sight,  in  the 
New  Testament,  of  the  spirit  and  life  of  its  words. 
The  recoil  was  even  stronger  from  the  shallowness 
and  pretentiousness  and  self-  display  of  what  was 
popularly  accepted  as  earnest  religion ;  morally  the 
preacher  was  revolted  at  its  unctuous  boasts  and 
pitiful  performance,  and  intellectually  by  its  narrow- 
ness and  meanness  of  thought  and  its  thinness  of 
colour  in  all  its  pictures  of  the  spiritual  life.  From 
first  to  last,  in  all  manner  of  ways,  the  sermons  are 
a  protest,  first  against  coldness,  but  even  still  more 
against  meanness,  in  religion.-  With  coldness  they 
have  no  sympathy,  yet  coldness  may  be  broad  and 
large  and  lofty  in  its  aspects ;  but  they  have  no  toler- 
ance for  what  makes  religion  little  and  poor  and 
superficial,  for  what  contracts  its  horizon  and  dwarfs 
its  infinite  greatness  and  vulgarises  its  mystery.  Open 
the  sermons  where  we  will,  different  readers  will  rise 
from  them  with  very  different  results ;  there  will  be 
among  many  the  strongest  and  most  decisive  dis- 
agreement ;  there  may  be  impatience  at  dogmatic 
harshness,  indignation  at  what  seems  overstatement 
and  injustice,  rejection  of  arguments  and  conclusions  ; 
but  there  will  always  be  the  sense  of  an  unfailing 
nobleness  in  the  way  in  which  the  writer  thinks  and 
speaks.  It  is  not  only  that  he  is  in  earnest ;  it  is  that 
he  has  something  which  really  is  worth  being  in 
earnest  for.  He  placed  the  heights  of  religion  very 
high.     If  you  have  a  religion  like  Christianity — this  is 


XXVIII       NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS  451 

the  pervading  note — think  of  it,  and  have  it,  worthily. 
People  will  differ  from  the  preacher  endlessly  as  to 
how  this  is  to  be  secured.  But  that  they  will  learn 
this  lesson  from  the  sermons,  with  a  force  with  which 
few  other  writers  have  taught  it,  and  that  this  lesson 
has  produced  its  effect  in  our  time,  there  can  be  no 
doubt.  The  only  reason  why  it  may  not  perhaps 
seem  so  striking  to  readers  of  this  day  is  that  the 
sermons  have  done  their  work,  and  we  do  not  feel 
what  they  had  to  counteract,  because  they  have  suc- 
ceeded in  great  measure  in  counteracting  it.  It  is 
not  too  much  to  say  that  they  have  done  more  than 
anything  else  to  revolutionise  the  whole  idea  of 
preaching  in  the  English  Church.  Mr.  Robertson, 
in  spite  of  himself,  was  as  much  the  pupil  of  their 
school  as  Mr.  Liddon,  though  both  are  so  widely 
different  from  their  master. 

The  theology  of  these  sermons  is  a  remarkable 
feature  about  them.  It  is  remarkable  in  this  way, 
that,  coming  from  a  teacher  like  Dr.  Newman,  it  is 
nevertheless  a  theology  which  most  religious  readers, 
except  the  Evangelicals  and  some  of  the  more  extreme 
Liberal  thinkers,  can  either  accept  heartily  or  be 
content  with,  as  they  would  be  content  with  St. 
Augustine  or  Thomas  a  Kempis — content,  not  because 
they  go  along  with  it  always,  but  because  it  is  large 
and  untechnical,  just  and  well-measured  in  the  pro- 
portions and  relative  importance  of  its  parts.  People 
of  very  different  opinions  turn  to  them,  as  being  on 
the  whole  the  fullest,  deepest,  most  comprehensive 


452  NEWMAN'S  PAROCPIIAL  SERMONS       xxviii 

approximation  they  can  find  to  representing  Chris- 
tianity in  a  practical  form.  Their  theology  is  nothing 
new ;  nor  does  it  essentially  change,  though  one  may 
observe  differences,  and  some  important  ones,  in  the 
course  of  the  volumes,  which  embrace  a  period  from 
1825  to  1842.  It  is  curious,  indeed,  to  observe  how 
early  the  general  character  of  the  sermons  was  deter- 
mined, and  how  in  the  main  it  continues  the  same. 
Some  of  the  first  in  point  of  date  are  among  the 
"  Plain  Sermons  " ;  and  though  they  may  have  been 
subsequently  retouched,  yet  there  the  keynote  is 
plainly  struck  of  that  severe  and  solemn  minor  which 
reigns  throughout.  Their  theology  is  throughout  the 
accepted  English  theology  of  the  Prayer-book  and  the 
great  Church  divines — a  theology  fundamentally  dog- 
matic and  sacramental,  but  jealously  keeping  the 
balance  between  obedience  and  faith ;  learned,  exact, 
and  measured,  but  definite  and  decided.  The  novelty 
was  in  the  application  of  it,  in  the  new  life  breathed 
into  it,  in  the  profound  and  intense  feelings  called 
forth  by  its  ideas  and  objects,  in  the  air  of  vastness 
and  awe  thrown  about  it,  in  the  unexpected  connection 
of  its  creeds  and  mysteries  with  practical  life,  in  the 
new  meaning  given  to  the  old  and  familiar,  in  the 
acceptance  in  thorough  earnest,  and  with  keen  pur- 
pose to  call  it  into  action,  of  what  had  been  guarded 
and  laid  by  with  dull  reverence.  Dr.  Newman  can 
hardly  be  called  in  these  sermons  an  innovator  on  the 
understood  and  recognised  standard  of  Anglican 
doctrine ;  he  accepted  its  outlines  as  Bishop  Wilson, 


XXVIII       NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS  45? 

for  instance,  might  have  traced  them.  What  he  did 
was  first  to  call  forth  from  it  what  it  really  meant,  the 
awful  heights  and  depths  of  its  current  words  and 
forms ;  and  next,  to  put  beside  them  human  character 
and  its  trials,  not  as  they  were  conventionally  repre- 
sented and  written  about,  but  as  a  piercing  eye  and 
sympathising  spirit  saw  them  in  the  light  of  our  nine- 
teenth century,  and  in  the  contradictory  and  com- 
plicated movements,  the  efforts  and  failures,  of  real 
life.  He  took  theology  for  granted,  as  a  Christian 
preacher  has  a  right  to  do  ;  he  does  not  prove  it,  and 
only  occasionally  meets  difficulties,  or  explains ;  but, 
taking  it  for  granted,  he  took  it  at  its  word,  in  its 
relation  to  the  world  of  actual  experience. 

Utterly  dissatisfied  with  what  he  found  current  as 
religion.  Dr.  Newman  sought,  without  leaving  the  old 
paths,  to  put  before  people  a  strong  and  energetic 
religion  based,  not  on  feeling  or  custom,  but  on 
reason  and  conscience,  and  answering,  in  the  vastness 
of  its  range,  to  the  mysteries  of  human  nature,  and  in 
its  power  to  man's  capacities  and  aims.  The  Liberal 
religion  of  that  day,  with  its  ideas  of  natural  theology 
or  of  a  cold  critical  Unitarianism,  was  a  very  shallow 
one;  the  Evangelical,  trusting  to  excitement,  had  worn 
out  its  excitement  and  had  reached  the  stage  when  its 
formulas,  poor  ones  at  the  best,  had  become  words 
•  without  meaning.  Such  views  might  do  in  quiet, 
easy-going  times,  if  religion  were  an  exercise  at  will 
of  imagination  or  thought,  an  indulgence,  an  orna- 
ment,  an   understanding,   a  fashion ;    not  if  it  cor- 


454  NEWMAN'S  TAROCHIAL  SERMONS       xxvin 

responded  to  such  a  state  of  things  as  is  implied  in 
the  Bible,  or  to  man's  many-sided  nature  as  it  is 
shown  in  Shakspeare.  The  sermons  reflect  with 
merciless  force  the  popular,  superficial,  comfortable 
thing  called  religion  which  the  writer  saw  before  him 
wherever  he  looked,  and  from  which  his  mind  recoiled. 
Such  sermons  as  those  on  the  "Self-wise  Enquirer" 
and  the  "Religion  of  the  Day,"  with  its  famous 
passage  about  the  age  not  being  sufficiently  "  gloomy 
and  fierce  in  its  religion,"  have  the  one-sided  and  un- 
measured exaggeration  which  seems  inseparable  from 
all  strong  expressions  of  conviction,  and  from  all  deep 
and  vehement  protests  against  general  faults;  but, 
qualify  and  limit  them  as  we  may,  their  pictures  were 
not  imaginary  ones,  and  there  was,  and  is,  but  too 
much  to  justify  them.  From  all  this  trifling  with 
religion  the  sermons  called  on  men  to  look  into  them- 
selves. They  appealed  to  conscience;  and  they 
appealed  equally  to  reason  and  thought,  to  recognise 
what  conscience  is,  and  to  deal  honestly  with  it.  They 
viewed  religion  as  if  projected  on  a  background  of 
natural  and  moral  mystery,  and  surrounded  by  it — an 
infinite  scene,  in  which  our  knowledge  is  like  the  Andes 
and  Himalayas  in  comparison  with  the  mass  of  the 
earth,  and  in  which  conscience  is  our  final  guide  and 
arbiter.  No  one  ever  brought  out  so  impressively  the 
sense  of  the  impenetrable  and  tremendous  vastness  of 
that  amid  which  man  plays  his  part.  In  such 
sermons  as  those  on  the  "Intermediate  State,"  the 
"Invisible  World,"  the  "Greatness  and  Littleness  of 


XXVIII        NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS  455 

Human  Life,"  the  "  Individuality  of  the  Soul,"  the 
"  Mysteriousness  of  our  Present  Being,"  we  may  see 
exemplified  the  enormous  irruption  into  the  world  of 
modern  thought  of  the  unknown  and  the  unknowable, 
as  much  as  in  the  writers  who,  with  far  different 
objects,  set  against  it  the  clearness  and  certainty  of 
what  we  do  know.  But,  beyond  all,  the  sermons 
appealed  to  men  to  go  back  into  their  own  thoughts 
and  feelings,  and  there  challenged  them ;  were  not 
the  preacher's  words  the  echoes  and  interpreting 
images  of  their  own  deepest,  possibly  most  perplexing 
and  baffling,  experience  ?  From  first  to  last  this  was 
his  great  engine  and  power;  from  first  to  last  he 
boldly  used  it.  He  claimed  to  read  their  hearts ;  and 
people  felt  that  he  did  read  them,  their  follies  and 
their  aspirations,  the  blended  and  tangled  web  of 
earnestness  and  dishonesty,  of  wishes  for  the  best  and 
truest,  and  acquiescence  in  makeshifts ;  understating 
what  ordinary  preachers  make  much  of,  bringing  into 
prominence  what  they  pass  by  without  being  able  to 
see  or  to  speak  of  it ;  keeping  before  his  hearers  the 
risk  of  mismanaging  their  hearts,  of  "  all  kinds  of  un- 
lawful treatment  of  the  soul."  What  a  contrast  to 
ordinary  ways  of  speaking  on  a  familiar  theological 
doctrine  is  this  way  of  bringing  it  into  immediate 
relation  to  real  feeling  : — 

It  is  easy  to  speak  of  human  nature  as  corrupt  in  the 
general,  to  admit  it  in  the  general,  and  then  get  quit  of  the 
subject ;  as  if,  the  doctrine  being  once  admitted,  there  was 
nothing  more  to  be  done  with  it.      But,  in  truth,  we  can 


456  NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS       xxviii 

have  no  real  apprehension  of  the  doctrine  of  our  corrup- 
tion till  we  view  the  structure  of  our  minds,  part  by  part ; 
and  dwell  upon  and  draw  out  the  signs  of  our  weakness, 
inconsistency,  and  ungodliness,  which  are  such  as  can 
arise  from  nothing  but  some  strange  original  defect  in 
our  original  nature.  .  .  .  We  are  in  the  dark  about  our- 
selves. When  we  act,  we  are  groping  in  the  dark,  and 
may  meet  with  a  fall  any  moment.  Here  and  there, 
perhaps,  we  see  a  little  ;  or  in  our  attempts  to  influence 
and  move  our  minds,  we  are  making  experiments  (as 
it  were)  with  some  delicate  and  dangerous  instrument, 
which  works  we  do  not  know  how,  and  may  produce  un- 
expected and  disastrous  effects.  The  management  of 
our  hearts  is  quite  above  us.  Under  these  circumstances 
it  becomes  our  comfort  to  look  up  to  God.  "  Thou,  God, 
seest  me."  Such  was  the  consolation  of  the  forlorn  Hagar 
in  the  wilderness.  He  knoweth  whereof  we  are  made,  and 
He  alone  can  uphold  us.  He  sees  with  most  appalling 
distinctness  all  our  sins,  all  the  windings  and  recesses  of 
evil  within  us  ;  yet  it  is  our  only  comfort  to  know  this, 
and  to  trust  Him  for  help  against  ourselves. — Vol.  I. 
Serm.  Xlii. 

The  preacher  contemplates  human  nature,  not  in 
the  stiff  formal  language  in  which  it  had  become  con- 
ventional with  divines  to  set  out  its  shortcomings  and 
dangers,  but  as  a  great  novelist  contemplates  and 
tries  to  describe  it ;  taking  in  all  its  real  contradic- 
tions and  anomalies,  its  subtle  and  delicate  shades ; 
fixing  upon  the  things  which  strike  us  in  ourselves  or 
our  neighbours  as  ways  of  acting  and  marks  of  char- 
acter ;  following  it  through  its  wide  and  varying  range, 


XXVIII        NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS  457 

its  diversified  and  liidden  folds  and  subtle  self-involv- 
ing realities  of  feeling  and  shiftiness ;  touching  it  in 
all  its  complex  sensibilities,  anticipating  its  dim  con- 
sciousnesses, half-raising  veils  which  hide  what  it  in- 
stinctively shrinks  from,  sending  through  it  unexpected 
thrills  and  shocks ;  large-hearted  in  indulgence,  yet 
exacting ;  most  tender,  yet  most  severe.  And  against 
all  this  real  play  of  nature  he  sets  in  their  full  force 
and  depth  the  great  ideas  of  God,  of  sin,  and  of  the 
Cross  j  and,  appealing  not  to  the  intelligence  of  an 
aristocracy  of  choice  natures,  but  to  the  needs  and 
troubles  and  longings  which  make  all  men  one,  he 
claimed  men's  common  sympathy  for  the  heroic  in 
purpose  and  standard.  He  warned  them  against 
being  fastidious,  where  they  should  be  hardy.  He 
spoke  in  a  way  that  all  could  understand  of  brave 
ventures,  of  resolutely  committing  themselves  to  truth 
and  duty. 

The  most  practical  of  sermons,  the  most  real  and 
natural  in  their  way  of  dealing  with  life  and  conduct, 
they  are  also  intensely  dogmatic.  The  writer's  whole 
teaching  presupposes,  as  we  all  know,  a  dogmatic 
religion ;  and  these  sermons  are  perhaps  the  best 
vindication  of  it  which  our  time,  disposed  to  think  of 
dogmas  with  suspicion,  has  seen.  For  they  show,  on 
a  large  scale  and  in  actual  working  instances,  how 
what  is  noblest,  most  elevated,  most  poetical,  most 
free  and  searching  in  a  thinker's  way  of  regarding  the 
wonderful  scene  of  life,  falls  in  naturally,  and  without 
strain,  with  a  great  dogmatic  system  like  that  of  the 


i58  NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS       xxviii 

Church.  Such  an  example  does  not  prove  that 
system  to  be  true,  but  it  proves  that  a  dogmatic 
system,  as  such,  is  not  the  cast-iron,  arbitrary,  artificial 
thing  which  it  is  often  assumed  to  be.  It  is,  indeed, 
the  most  shallow  of  all  commonplaces,  intelligible  in 
ordinary  minds,  but  unaccountable  in  those  of  high 
power  and  range,  whether  they  believe  or  not,  that  a 
dogmatic  religion  is  of  course  a  hard,  dry,  narrow, 
unreal  religion,  without  any  affinities  to  poetry  or  the 
truth  of  things,  or  to  the  deeper  and  more  sacred  and 
powerful  of  human  thoughts.  If  dogmas  are  not  true, 
that  is  another  matter ;  but  it  is  the  fashion  to  imply 
that  dogmas  are  worthless,  mere  things  of  the  past, 
without  sense  or  substance  or  interest,  because  they 
are  dogmas.  As  if  Dante  was  not  dogmatic  in  form 
and  essence;  as  if  the  grandest  and  worthiest  religious 
prose  in  the  English  language  was  not  that  of  Hooker, 
nourished  up  amid  the  subtleties,  but  also  amid 
the  vast  horizons  and  solemn  heights,  of  scholastic 
divinity.  A  dogmatic  system  is  hard  in  hard  hands, 
and  shallow  in  shallow  minds,  and  barren  in  dull 
ones,  and  unreal  and  empty  to  preoccupied  and 
unsympathising  ones ;  we  dwarf  and  distort  ideas 
that  we  do  not  like,  and  when  we  have  put  them  in 
our  own  shapes  and  in  our  own  connection,  we  call 
them  unmeaning  or  impossible.  Dogmas  are  but 
expedients,  common  to  all  great  departments  of 
human  thought,  and  felt  in  all  to  be  necessary,  for 
representing  what  are  believed  as  truths,  for  exhibit- 
ing their  order  and  consequences,  for  expressing  the 


XXVIII       NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS  459 

meaning  of  terms,  and  the  relations  of  thought.  If 
they  are  wrong,  they  are,  hke  everything  else  in  the 
world,  open  to  be  proved  wrong;  if  they  are  in- 
adequate, they  are  open  to  correction  ;  but  it  is  idle 
to  sneer  at  them  for  being  what  they  must  be,  if 
religious  facts  and  truths  are  to  be  followed  out  by  the 
thoughts  and  expressed  by  the  language  of  man. 
And  what  dogmas  are  in  unfriendly  and  incapable 
hands  is  no  proof  of  what  they  may  be  when  they 
are  approached  as  things  instinct  with  truth  and  life ; 
it  is  no  measure  of  the  way  in  which  they  may  be 
inextricably  interwoven  with  the  most  unquestionably 
living  thought  and  feeling,  as  in  these  sermons. 
Jealous,  too,  as  the  preacher  is  for  Church  doctrines 
as  the  springs  of  Christian  life,  no  writer  of  our  time 
perhaps  has  so  emphatically  and  impressively  recalled 
the  narrow  limits  within  which  human  language  can 
represent  Divine  realities.  No  one  that  we  know  of 
shows  that  he  has  before  his  mind  with  such  intense 
force  and  distinctness  the  idea  of  God ;  and  in  pro- 
portion as  a  mind  takes  in  and  submits  itself  to  the 
impression  of  that  awful  vision,  the  gulf  widens 
between  all  possible  human  words  and  that  which 
they  attempt  to  express  : — 

When  we  have  deduced  what  we  deduce  by  our  reason 
from  the  study  of  visible  nature,  and  then  read  what  we 
read  in  His  inspired  word,  and  find  the  two  apparently 
discordant,  this  is  the  feeling  I  think  we  ought  to 
have  on  our  minds  ; — not  an  impatience  to  do  what  is 
beyond  our  powers,  to  weigh  evidence,  sum  up,  balance, 


4 GO  NEWMAN'S  rAROCIIIAL  SERMONS        xxviii 

decide,  reconcile,  to  arbitrate  between  the  two  voices  of 
God, — but  a  sense  of  the  utter  nothingness  of  w^orms  such 
as  we  are  ;  of  our  plain  and  absolute  incapacity  to  con- 
template things  as  they  really  are ;  a  perception  of  our 
emptiness  before  the  great  Vision  of  God;  of  our  "come- 
liness being  turned  into  corruption,  and  our  retaining  no 
strength "  ;  a  conviction  that  what  is  put  before  us, 
whether  in  nature  or  in  grace,  is  but  an  intimation,  useful 
for  particular  purposes,  useful  for  practice,  useful  in  its 
department,  "  until  the  day  break  and  the  shadows  flee 
away "  ;  useful  in  such  a  way  that  both  the  one  and 
the  other  representation  may  at  once  be  used,  as  two 
languages,  as  two  separate  approximations  towards  the 
Awful  Unknown  Truth,  such  as  will  not  mislead  us  in 
their  respective  provinces. — Vol.  II.  Serm.  xviii. 

"  I  cannot  persuade  myself,"  he  says,  commenting  on 
a  mysterious  text  of  Scripture,  "  thus  to  dismiss  so  solemn 
a  passage  "  {i.e.  by  saying  that  it  is  "  all  figurative "). 
"  It  seems  a  presumption  to  say  of  dim  notices  about  the 
unseen  world,  'they  only  mean  this  or  that,'  as  if  one  had 
ascended  into  the  third  heaven,  or  had  stood  before  the 
throne  of  God.  No  ;  I  see  herein  a  deep  mystery,  a 
hidden  truth,  which  I  cannot  handle  or  define,  shining 
'  as  jewels  at  the  bottom  of  the  great  deep,'  darkly  and 
tremulously,  yet  really  there.  And  for  this  very  reason, 
while  it  is  neither  pious  nor  thankful  to  explain  away  the 
words  which  convey  it,  while  it  is  a  duty  to  use  them, 
not  less  a  duty  is  it  to  use  them  humbly,  diffidently,  and 
teachably,  with  the  thought  of  God  before  us,  and  of  our 
own  nothingness." — Vol.  III.  Serm.  XXV. 

There  are  two  great  requisites  for  treating  properly 


XXVIII        NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS  461 

the  momentous  questions  and  issues  which  have  been 
brought  before  our  generation.  The  first  is  accuracy 
— accuracy  of  facts,  of  terms,  of  reasoning ;  plain 
close  dealing  with  questions  in  their  real  and  actual 
conditions;  clear,  simple,  honest,  measured  statements 
about  things  as  we  find  them.  The  other  is  elevation, 
breadth,  range  of  thought ;  a  due  sense  of  what  these 
questions  mean  and  involve  ;  a  power  of  looking  at 
things  from  a  height ;  a  sufficient  taking  into. account 
of  possibilities,  of  our  ignorance,  of  the  real  proportions 
of  things.  We  have  plenty  of  the  first ;  we  are  for 
the  most  part  lamentably  deficient  in  the  second. 
And  of  this,  these  sermons  are,  to  those  who  have 
studied  them,  almost  unequalled  examples.  Many 
people,  no  doubt,  would  rise  from  their  perusal 
profoundly  disagreeing  with  their  teaching ;  but  no 
one,  it  seems  to  us,  could  rise  from  them — with  their 
strong  effortless  freedom,  their  lofty  purpose,  their 
generous  standard,  their  deep  and  governing  ap- 
preciation of  divine  things,  their  thoroughness,  their 
unselfishness,  their  purity,  their  austere  yet  piercing 
sympathy — and  not  feel  his  whole  ways  of  thinking 
about  religion  permanently  enlarged  and  raised.  He 
will  feel  that  he  has  been  with  one  who  "told  him 
what  he  knew  about  himself  and  what  he  did  not 
know ;  has  read  to  him  his  wants  or  feelings,  and 
comforted  him  by  the  very  reading ;  has  made  him 
feel  that  there  was  a  higher  life  than  this  life,  and  a 
brighter  world  than  we  can  see ;  has  encouraged  him, 
or  sobered  him,  or  opened  a  way  to  the  inquiring,  or 


4G2  NEWMAN'S  PAROCHIAL  SERMONS       xxviii 

soothed  the  perplexed."  They  show  a  man  who  saw 
very  deeply  into  the  thought  of  his  time,  and  who,  if 
he  partly  recoiled  from  it  and  put  it  back,  at  least 
equally  shared  it.  Dr.  Newman  has  been  accused  of 
being  out  of  sympathy  with  his  age,  and  of  disparaging 
it.  In  reality,  no  one  has  proved  himself  more  keenly 
sensitive  to  its  greatness  and  its  wonders ;  only  he 
beUeved  that  he  saw  something  greater  still.  We  are 
not  of  those  who  can  accept  the  solution  which  he 
has  accepted  of  the  great  problems  which  haunt  our 
society  ;  but  he  saw  better  than  most  men  what  those 
problems  demand,  and  the  variety  of  their  often 
conflicting  conditions.  Other  men,  perhaps,  have 
succeeded  better  in  what  they  aimed  at ;  but  no  one 
has  attempted  more,  with  powers  and  disinterestedness 
which  justified  him  in  attempting  it.  The  movement 
which  he  led,  and  of  which  these  sermons  are  the 
characteristic  monument,  is  said  to  be  a  failure  ;  but 
there  are  failures,  and  even  mistakes,  which  are  worth 
many  successes  of  other  sorts,  and  which  are  more 
fruitful  and  permanent  in  their  effects. 


XXIX 

CARDINAL    NEWMAN^ 

It  is  not  wonderful  that  people  should  be  impressed 
by  the  vicissitudes  and  surprises  and  dramatic  com- 
pleteness of  Cardinal  Newman's  career.  It  is  not 
wonderful  that  he  should  be  impressed  by  this 
himself.  That  he  who  left  us  in  despair  and  indig- 
nation in  1845  should  have  passed  through  a  course 
of  things  which  has  made  him,  Roman  Catholic  as 
he  is,  a  man  of  whom  Englishmen  are  so  proud  in 
1879,  is  even  more  extraordinary  than  that  the  former 
Fellow  of  Oriel  should  now  be  surrounded  with  the 
pomp  and  state  of  a  Cardinal.  There  is  only  one 
other  career  in  our  time  which,  with  the  greatest 
possible  contrasts  in  other  points,  suggests  in  its 
strangeness  and  antecedent  improbabilities  some- 
thing of  a  parallel.  It  is  the  train  of  events  which 
has  made  "  Disraeli  the  Younger  "  the  most  powerful 
Minister  whom  England  has  seen  in  recent  years. 
But  Lord  Beaconsfield  has  aimed  at  what  he  has 
attained  to,  and  has  fought  his  way  to  it  through  the 

^  Guai'diati,  21st  May  1879, 


4G4  CARDINAL  NEWMAN  xxix 

chances  and  struggles  of  a  stirring  public  life.  Car- 
dinal Newman's  life  has  been  from  first  to  last  the 
life  of  the  student  and  recluse.  He  has  lived  in  the 
shade.  He  has  sought  nothing  for  himself.  He  has 
shrunk  from  the  thought  of  advancement.  The  steps 
to  the  high  places  of  the  world  have  not  offered 
themselves  to  him,  and  he  has  been  content  to  be 
let  alone.  Early  in  his  course  his  rare  gifts  of  mind, 
his  force  of  character,  his  power  over  hearts  and 
sympathies,  made  him  for  a  while  a  prominent  person. 
Then  came  a  series  of  events  which  seemed  to  throw 
him  out  of  harmony  with  the  great  mass  of  his  coun- 
trymen. He  appeared  to  be,  if  not  forgotten,  yet 
not  thought  of,  except  by  a  small  number  of  friends 
— old  friends  who  had  known  him  too  well  and  too 
closely  ever  to  forget,  and  new  friends  gathered  round 
him  by  the  later  circumstances  of  his  life  and  work. 
People  spoke  of  him  as  a  man  who  had  made  a  great 
mistake  and  failed ;  who  had  thrown  up  influence 
and  usefulness  here,  and  had  not  found  it  there ;  too 
subtle,  too  imaginative  for  England,  too  independent 
for  Rome.  He  seemed  to  have  so  sunk  out  of 
interest  and  account  that  off-hand  critics,  in  the  easy 
gaiety  of  their  heart,  might  take  liberties  with  his 
name. 

Then  came  the  first  surprise.  The  Apologia  was 
read  with  the  keenest  interest  by  those  who  most 
differed  from  the  writer's  practical  conclusions ;  twenty 
years  had  elapsed  since  he  had  taken  the  unpopular 
step  which  seemed  to  condemn  him  to  obscurity ; 


XXIX  CARDINAL  NEWMAN  465 

and  now  he  emerged  from  it,  challenging  not  in  vain 
the  sympathy  of  his  countrymen.  They  awoke,  it 
may  be  said — at  least  the  younger  generation  of  them 
— to  what  he  really  was ;  the  old  jars  and  bitternesses 
had  passed  out  of  remembrance ;  they  only  felt  that 
they  had  one  among  them  who  could  write — for  few  of 
them  ever  heard  his  wonderful  voice — in  a  way  which 
made  English  hearts  respond  quickly  and  warmly. 
And  the  strange  thing  was  that  the  professed,  the 
persistent  denouncer  of  Liberalism,  was  welcomed 
back  to  his  rightful  place  among  Englishmen  by  none 
more  warmly  than  by  many  Liberals.  Still,  though 
his  name  was  growing  more  familiar  year  by  year, 
the  world  did  not  see  much  more  of  him.  The  head 
of  a  religious  company,  of  an  educational  institution 
at  Birmingham,  he  lived  in  unpretending  and  quiet 
simplicity,  occupied  with  the  daily  business  of  his 
house,  with  his  books,  with  his  correspondence,  with 
finishing  off  his  many  literary  and  theological  under- 
takings. Except  in  some  chance  reference  in  a  book 
or  newspaper  which  implied  how  considerable  a 
person  the  world  thought  him,  he  was  not  heard  of. 
People  asked  about  him,  but  there  was  nothing  to 
tell.  Then  at  last,  neglected  by  Pius  IX.,  he  was 
remembered  by  Leo  XIII.  The  Pope  offered  him 
the  Cardinalship,  he  said,  because  he  thought  it 
would  be  "grateful  to  the  Catholics  of  England,  and 
to  England  itself."  And  he  was  not  mistaken. 
Probably  there  is  not  a  single  thing  that  the  Pope 
could  do  which  would  be  so  heartily  welcomed. 

VOL.  II  2  H 


4C6  CARDINAL  NEWMAN  xxix 

After  breaking  with  England  and  all  things  English 
in  wrath  and  sorrow,  nearly  thirty-five  years  ago,  after 
a  long  life  of  modest  retirement,  unmarked  by  any 
public  honours,  at  length  before  he  dies  Dr.  Newman 
is  recognised  by  Protestant  England  as  one  of  its 
greatest  men.  It  watches  with  interest  his  journey 
to  Rome,  his  proceedings  at  Rome.  In  a  crowd  of 
new  Cardinals — men  of  eminence  in  their  own  com- 
munion— he  is  the  only  one  about  whom  Englishmen 
know  or  care  anything.  His  words,  when  he  speaks, 
pass  verbatim  along  the  telegraph  wires,  like  the  words 
of  the  men  who  sway  the  world.  We  read  of  the 
quiet  Oxford  scholar's  arms  emblazoned  on  vestment 
and  furniture  as  those  of  a  Prince  of  the  Church, 
and  of  his  motto — Cor  ad  cor  loquitur.  In  that  motto 
is  the  secret  of  all  that  he  is  to  his  countrymen.  For 
that  skill  of  which  he  is  such  a  master,  in  the  use  of 
his  and  their  "sweet  mother  tongue,"  is  something 
much  more  than  literary  accomplishment  and  power. 
It  means  that  he  has  the  key  to  what  is  deepest  in 
their  nature  and  most  characteristic  in  them  of  feeling 
and  conviction — to  what  is  deeper  than  opinions  and 
theories  and  party  divisions ;  to  what  in  their  most 
solemn  moments  they  most  value  and  most  believe  in. 

His  profound  sympathy  with  the  religiousness 
which  still,  with  all  the  variations  and  all  the  immense 
shortcomings  of  English  religion,  marks  England 
above  all  cultivated  Christian  nations,  is  really  the 
bond  between  him  and  his  countrymen,  who  yet  for 
thj   most   part   think   so  differently  from   him,   both 


XXIX  CARDINAL  NEWMAN  467 

about  the  speculative  grounds  and  many  of  the  prac- 
tical details  of  religion.  But  it  was  natural  for  him, 
on  an  occasion  like  this,  reviewing  the  past  and  con- 
necting it  with  the  present,  to  dwell  on  these  differ- 
ences. He  repeated  once  more,  and  made  it  the 
keynote  of  his  address,  his  old  protest  against 
"Liberalism  in  religion,"  the  "doctrine  that  there  is 
no  positive  truth  in  religion,  but  one  creed  is  as 
good  as  another."  He  lamented  the  decay  of  the 
power  of  authority,  the  disappearance  of  religion 
from  the  sphere  of  political  influence,  from  education, 
from  legislation.  He  deplored  the  increasing  im- 
possibility of  getting  men  to  work  together  on  a 
common  religious  basis.  He  pointed  out  the  increas- 
ing seriousness  and  earnestness  of  the  attempts  to 
"supersede,  to  block  out  religion,"  by  an  imposing 
and  high  morality,  claiming  to  dispense  with  it. 

He  dwelt  on  the  mischief  and  dangers ;  he  ex- 
pressed, as  any  Christian  would,  his  fearlessness  and 
faith  in  spite  of  them ;  but  do  we  gather,  even  from 
such  a  speaker,  and  on  such  an  occasion,  anything  of 
the  remedy  ?  The  principle  of  authority  is  shaken, 
he  tells  us ;  what  can  he  suggest  to  restore  it  ?  He 
under-estimates,  probably,  the  part  which  authority 
plays,  implicitly  yet  very  really,  in  English  popular 
religion,  much  more  in  English  Church  religion ;  and 
authority,  even  in  Rome,  is  not  everything,  and  does 
not  reach  to  every  subject.  But  authority  in  our 
days  can  be  nothing  without  real  confidence  in  it; 
and  where  confidence  in  authority  has  been  lost,  it 


468  CARDINAL  NEWMAN  xxix 

is  idle  to  attempt  to  restore  it  by  telling  men  that 
authority  is  a  good  and  necessary  thing.  It  must  be 
won  back,  not  simply  claimed.  It  must  be  regained, 
when  forfeited,  by  the  means  by  which  it  was  origin- 
ally gained.  And  the  strange  phenomenon  was 
obviously  present  to  his  clear  and  candid  mind, 
though  he  treated  it  as  one  which  is  disappearing, 
and  must  at  length  pass  away,  that  precisely  here 
in  England,  where  the  only  religious  authority  he 
recognises  has  been  thrown  off,  the  hold  of  religion 
on  public  interest  is  most  effective  and  most  obsti- 
nately tenacious. 

What  is  the  history  of  this  ?  What  is  the  explana- 
tion of  it?  Why  is  it  that  where  "authority,"  as  he 
understands  it,  has  been  longest  paramount  and 
undisputed,  the  public  place  and  public  force  of 
religion  have  most  disappeared ;  and  that  a  "  dozen 
men  taken  at  random  in  the  streets  "  of  London  find 
it  easier,  with  all  their  various  sects,  to  work  together 
on  a  religious  basis  than  a  dozen  men  taken  at 
random  from  the  streets  of  CathoHc  Paris  or  Rome  ? 
Indeed,  the  public  feeHng  towards  himself,  expressed 
in  so  many  ways  in  the  last  few  weeks,  might  suggest 
a  question  not  undeserving  of  his  thoughts.  The 
mass  of  EngHshmen  are  notoriously  anti-Popish  and 
anti-Roman.  Their  antipathies  on  this  subject  are 
profound,  and  not  always  reasonable.  They  cer- 
tainly do  not  here  halt  between  two  opinions,  or 
think  that  one  creed  is  as  good  as  another.  What 
is  it  which  has  made  so  many  of  them,  still  retaining 


XXIX  CARDINAL  NEWMAN  469 

all  their  intense  dislike  to  the  system  which  Cardinal 
Newman  has  accepted,  yet  welcome  so  heartily  his 
honours  in  it,  notwithstanding  that  he  has  passed 
from  England  to  Rome,  and  that  he  owes  so  much 
of  what  he  is  to  England  ?  Is  it  that  they  think  it 
does  not  matter  what  a  man  believes,  and  whether  a 
man  turns  Papist  ?  Or  is  it  not  that,  in  spite  of  all 
that  would  repel  and  estrange,  in  spite  of  the  opposi- 
tions of  argument  and  the  inconsistencies  of  specula- 
tion, they  can  afford  to  recognise  in  him,  as  in  a  high 
example,  what  they  most  sincerely  believe  in  and  most 
deeply  prize,  and  can  pay  him  the  tribute  of  their 
gratitude  and  honour,  even  when  unconvinced  by 
his  controversial  reasonings,  and  unsatisfied  by  the 
theories  which  he  has  proposed  to  explain  the  per- 
plexing and  refractory  anomalies  of  Church  history  ? 
Is  it  not  that  with  history,  inexorable  and  unalter- 
able behind  them,  condemning  and  justifying,  sup- 
porting and  warning  all  sides  in  turn,  thoughtful  men 
feel  how  much  easier  it  is  to  point  out  and  deplore 
our  disasters  than  to  see  a  way  now  to  set  them 
right  ?  Is  it  not  also  that  there  are  in  the  Christian 
Church  bonds  of  affinity,  subtler,  more  real  and  more 
prevailing  than  even  the  fatal  legacies  of  the  great 
schisms  ?  Is  it  not  that  the  sympathies  which  unite 
the  author  of  the  Parochial  Sennoiis  and  the  inter- 
preter of  St.  Athanasius  with  the  disciples  of  Andrewes, 
and  Ken,  and  Bull,  of  Butler  and  Wilson,  are  as  strong 
and  natural  as  the  barriers  -  hich  outwardly  keep  them 
asunder  are  to  human  eyes  hopelessly  insurmountable? 


XXX 
CARDINAL    NEWMAN'S    COURSE  ^ 

The  long  life  is  closed.  And  men,  according  to 
their  knowledge  and  intelligence,  turn  to  seek  for 
some  governing  idea  or  aspect  of  things,  by  which  to 
interpret  the  movements  and  changes  of  a  course 
which,  in  spite  of  its  great  changes,  is  felt  at  bottom 
to  have  been  a  uniform  and  consistent  one.  For  it 
seems  that,  at  starting,  he  is  at  once  intolerant,  even 
to  harshness,  to  the  Roman  Church,  and  tolerant, 
though  not  sympathetic,  to  the  Enghsh ;  then  the 
parts  are  reversed,  and  he  is  intolerant  to  the  English 
and  tolerant  to  the  Roman ;  and  then  at  last,  when 
he  finally  anchored  in  the  Roman  Church,  he  is  seen 
as — not  tolerant,  for  that  would  involve  dogmatic 
points  on  which  he  was  most  jealous,  but — sym- 
pathetic in  all  that  was  of  interest  to  England,  and 
ready  to  recognise  what  was  good  and  high  in  the 
English  Church. 

Is  not  the  ultimate  key  to  Newman's  history  his 
keen  and  profound  sense  of  the  life,  society,  and  prin- 

1  Guardian,  13th  August  1890. 


\ 


XXX  CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  COURSE  471 

ciples  of  action  presented  in  the  New  Testament  ? 
To  this  New  Testament  Hfe  he  saw,  opposed  and  in 
contrast,  the  ways  and  assumptions  of  English  life, 
religious  as  well  as  secular.  He  saw  that  the  organ- 
isation of  society  had  been  carried,  and  was  still  being 
carried,  to  great  and  wonderful  perfection ;  only  it 
was  the  perfection  of  a  society  and  way  of  life  adapted 
to  the  present  world,  and  having  its  ends  here  ;  only 
it  was  as  different  as  anything  can  be  from  the  picture 
which  the  writers  of  the  New  Testament,  consciously 
and  unconsciously,  give  of  themselves  and  their 
friends.  Here  was  a  Church,  a  religion,  a  "  Christian 
nation,"  professing  to  be  identical  in  spirit  and 
rules  of  faith  and  conduct  with  the  Church  and 
religion  of  the  Gospels  and  Epistles ;  and  what  was 
the  identity,  beyond  certain  phrases  and  conventional 
suppositions  ?  He  could  not  see  a  trace  in  English 
society  of  that  simple  and  severe  hold  of  the  unseen 
and  the  future  which  is  the  colour  and  breath,  as  well 
as  the  outward  form,  of  the  New  Testament  life. 
Nothing  could  be  more  perfect,  nothing  grander  and 
nobler,  than  all  the  current  arrangements  for  this 
life;  its  justice  and  order  and  increasing  gentleness,  its 
widening  sympathies  between  men ;  but  it  was  all  for 
the  perfection  and  improvement  of  this  life;  it  would  all 
go  on,  if  what  we  experience  nov/  was  our  only  scene 
and  destiny.  This  perpetual  antithesis  haunted  him, 
when  he  knew  it,  or  when  he  did  not.  Against  it  the 
Church  ought  to  be  the  perpetual  protest,  and  the 
fearless  challenge,  as  it  was  in  the  days  of  the  New 


472  CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  COURSE  xxx 

Testament.  But  the  English  Church  had  drunk  in, 
he  held,  too  deeply  the  temper,  ideas,  and  laws  of  an  am- 
bitious and  advancing  civilisation ;  so  much  so  as  to 
be  unfaithful  to  its  special  charge  and  mission.  The 
prophet  had  ceased  to  rebuke,  warn,  and  suffer ;  he 
had  thrown  in  his  lot  with  those  who  had  ceased  to 
be  cruel  and  inhuman,  but  who  thought  only  of  mak- 
ing their  dwelling-place  as  secure  and  happy  as  they 
could.  The  Church  had  become  respectable,  com- 
fortable, sensible,  temperate,  liberal;  jealous  about 
the  forms  of  its  creeds,  equally  jealous  of  its  secular 
rights,  interested  in  the  discussion  of  subordinate 
questions,  and  becoming  more  and  more  tolerant  of 
differences ;  ready  for  works  of  benevolence  and  large 
charity,  in  sympathy  with  the  agricultural  poor,  open- 
handed  in  its  gifts;  a  willing  fellow-worker  with  society 
in  kindly  deeds,  and  its  accomplice  in  secularity.  All 
this  was  admirable,  but  it  was  not  the  life  of  the  New 
Testament,  and  it  was  that  which  filled  his  thoughts. 
The  English  Church  had  exchanged  religion  for  civil- 
isation, the  first  century  for  the  nineteenth,  the  New 
Testament  as  it  is  written,  for  a  counterfeit  of  it  inter- 
preted by  Paley  or  Mr.  Simeon ;  and  it  seemed  to 
have  betrayed  its  trust. 

Form  after  form  was  tried  by  him,  the  Chris- 
tianity of  Evangelicalism,  the  Christianity  of  Whately, 
the  Christianity  of  Hawkins,  the  Christianity  of 
Keble  and  Pusey ;  it  was  all  very  well,  but  it  was 
not  the  Christianity  of  the  New  Testament  and  of 
the  first  ages.     He  wrote  the  Church  of  (he  Fathers 


XXX  CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  COURSE  473 

to  show  they  were  not  merely  evidences  of  rehgion, 
but  really  living  men ;  that  they  could  and  did  live  as 
they  taught,  and  what  was  there  like  the  New  Testa- 
ment or  even  the  first  ages  now  ?  Alas !  there  was 
nothing  completely  like  them ;  but  of  all  unlike  things, 
the  Church  of  England  with  its  "smug  parsons,"  and 
pony-carriages  for  their  wives  and  daughters,  seemed 
to  him  the  most  unlike :  more  unlike  than  the  great  un- 
reformed  Roman  Church,  with  its  strange,  unscriptural 
doctrines  and  its  undeniable  crimes,  and  its  alHance, 
wherever  it  could,  with  the  world.  But  at  least  the 
Roman  Church  had  not  only  preserved,  but  main- 
tained at  full  strength  through  the  centuries  to  our 
day  two  things  of  which  the  New  Testament  was  full, 
and  which  are  characteristic  of  it — devotion  and  self- 
sacrifice.  The  crowds  at  a  pilgrimage,  a  shrine,  or  a 
"pardon"  were  much  more  like  the  multitudes  who 
followed  our  Lord  about  the  hills  of  Galilee — like 
them  probably  in  that  imperfect  faith  which  we  call 
superstition — than  anything  that  could  be  seen  in  the 
English  Church,  even  if  the  Salvation  Army  were  one 
of  its  instruments.  And  the  spirit  which  governed 
the  Roman  Church  had  prevailed  on  men  to  make 
the  sacrifice  of  celibacy  a  matter  of  course,  as  a  con- 
dition of  ministering  in  a  regular  and  systematic  way 
not  only  to  the  souls,  but  to  the  bodies  of  men,  not 
only  for  the  Priesthood,  but  for  educational  Brother- 
hoods, and  Sisters  of  the  poor  and  of  hospitals. 
Devotion  and  sacrifice,  prayer  and  self-denying  charity, 
jn  one  word  sanctity,  are  at  once  on  the  surface  of 


474  CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  COURSE  xxx 

the  New  Testament  and  interwoven  with  all  its  sub- 
stance. He  recoiled  from  a  representation  of  the 
religion  of  the  New  Testament  which  to  his  eye  was 
without  them.  He  turned  to  where,  in  spite  of  every 
other  disadvantage,  he  thought  he  found  them.  In 
S.  Filippo  Neri  he  could  find  a  link  between  the 
New  Testament  and  progressive  civilisation.  He 
could  find  no  S.  Filippo — so  modern  and  yet  so 
Scriptural — when  he  sought  at  home. 

His  mind,  naturally  alive  to  all  greatness,  had  early 
been  impressed  with  the  greatness  of  the  Church  of 
Rome.  But  in  his  early  days  it  was  the  greatness  of 
Anti-Christ.  Then  came  the  change,  and  his  sense 
of  greatness  was  satisfied  by  the  commanding  and 
undoubting  attitude  of  the  Roman  system,  by  the 
completeness  of  its  theory,  by  the  sweep  of  its  claims 
and  its  rule,  by  the  even  march  of  its  vast  adminis- 
tration. It  could  not  and  it  did  not  escape  him, 
that  the  Roman  Church,  with  all  the  good  things 
which  it  had,  was,  as  a  whole,  as  unlike  the  Church 
of  the  New  Testament  and  of  the  first  ages  as  the 
English.  He  recognised  it  frankly,  and  built  up  a 
great  theory  to  account  for  the  fact,  incorporat- 
ing and  modernising  great  portions  of  the  re- 
ceived Roman  explanations  of  the  fact.  But  what 
won  his  heart  and  his  enthusiasm  was  one  thing ; 
what  justified  itself  to  his  intellect  was  another. 
And  it  was  the  reproduction,  partial,  as  it  might 
be,  yet  real  and  characteristic,  in  the  Roman 
Church  of  the  life  and  ways  of  the  New  Testament, 


XXX  CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  COURSE  475 

which  was  the  irresistible  attraction  that  tore  him 
from  the  associations  and  the  affections  of  half  a 
lifetime. 

The  final  break  with  the  English  Church  was  with 
much  heat  and  bitterness ;  and  both  sides  knew  too 
much  each  of  the  other  to  warrant  the  language  used 
on  each  side.  The  English  Church  had  received 
too  much  loyal  and  invaluable  service  from  him  in 
teaching  and  example  to  have  insulted  him,  as  many 
of  its  chief  authorities  did,  with  the  charges  of  dis- 
honesty and  bad  faith ;  his  persecutors  forgot  that 
a  little  effort  on  his  part  might,  if  he  had  been  what 
they  called  him,  and  had  really  been  a  traitor,  have 
formed  a  large  and  compact  party,  whose  secession 
might  have  caused  fatal  damage.  And  he,  too,  knew 
too  much  of  the  better  side  of  English  religious  life 
to  justify  the  fierce  invective  and  sarcasm  with  which 
he  assailed  for  a  time  the  English  Church  as  a  mere 
system  of  comfortable  and  self-deceiving  worldliness. 

But  as  time  went  over  him  in  his  new  position  two 
things  made  themselves  felt.  One  was,  that  though 
there  was  a  New  Testament  life,  lived  in  the  Roman 
Church  with  conspicuous  truth  and  reality,  yet  the 
Roman  Church,  like  the  English,  was  administered 
and  governed  by  men — men  with  passions  and  faults, 
men  of  mixed  characters — who  had,  like  their  English 
contemporaries  and  rivals,  ends  and  rules  of  action 
not  exactly  like  those  of  the  New  Testament.  The 
Roman  Church  had .  to  accept,  as  much  as  the 
English,  the  modern  conditions  of  social  and  political 


476  CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  COURSE  xxx 

life,  however  different  in  outward  look  from  those  of 
the  Sermon  on  the  Mount.  The  other  was  the 
increasing  sense  that  the  civilisation  of  the  West  was 
as  a  whole,  and  notwithstanding  grievous  drawbacks, 
part  of  God's  providential  government,  a  noble  and 
beneficent  thing,  ministering  graciously  to  man's 
peace  and  order,  which  Christians  ought  to  recognise 
as  a  blessing  of  their  times  such  as  their  fathers  had 
not,  for  which  they  ought  to  be  thankful,  and  which, 
if  they  were  wise,  they  would  put  to  what,  in  his 
phrase,  was  an  "  Apostolical "  use.  In  one  of  the 
angelical  hymns  in  the  Drea?n  of  Gerontiiis^  he 
dwells  on  the  Divine  goodness  which  led  men  to 
found  "a  household  and  a  fatherland,  a  city  and  a 
state  "  with  an  earnestness  of  sympathy,  recalling  the 
enumeration  of  the  achievements  of  human  thought 
and  hand,  and  the  arts  of  civil  and  social  life — koX 
(j^diyfia  KoX  yp€/jLO€V  (ppovrj/xa  Koi  aaruvo/jLov^; 
6pyd(i  —  dwelt  on  so  fondly  by  Aeschylus  and 
Sophocles. 

The  force  with  which  these  two  things  made  them- 
selves felt  as  age  came  on  —  the  disappointments 
attending  his  service  to  the  Church,  and  the  grandeur 
of  the  physical  and  social  order  of  the  world  and  its 
Divine  sanction  in  spite  of  all  that  is  evil  and  all  that 
is  so  shortlived  in  it — produced  a  softening  in  his  ways 
of  thought  and  speech.  Never  for  a  moment  did  his 
loyalty  and  obedience  to  his  Church,  even  when  most 
tried,  waver  and  falter.  The  thing  is  inconceiv- 
able to  any  one  who  ever  knew  him,  and  the  mere 


XXX  CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  COURSE  477 

suggestion  would  be  enough  to  make  him  blaze  forth 
in  all  his  old  fierceness  and  power.  But  perfectly 
satisfied  of  his  position,  and  with  his  duties  clearly 
defined,  he  could  allow  large  and  increasing  play,  in 
the  leisure  of  advancing  age,  to  his  natural  sym- 
pathies, and  to  the  efi'ect  of  the  wonderful  spectacle 
of  the  world  around  him.  He  was,  after  all,  an 
Englishman ;  and  with  all  his  quickness  to  detect 
and  denounce  what  was  selfish  and  poor  in  English 
ideas  and  action,  and  with  all  the  strength  of  his 
deep  antipathies,  his  chief  interests  were  for  things 
English  —  English  literature,  English  social  life, 
English  politics,  English  religion.  He  liked  to  identify 
himself,  as  far  as  it  was  possible,  with  things  English, 
even  with  things  that  belonged  to  his  own  first  days. 
He  republished  his  Oxford  sermons  and  treatises. 
He  prized  his  honorary  fellowship  at  Trinity ;  he 
enjoyed  his  visit  to  Oxford,  and  the  welcome  which 
he  met  there.  He  discerned  how  much  the  English 
Church  counted  for  in  the  fight  going  on  in  England 
for  the  faith  in  Christ.  There  was  in  all  that  he 
said  and  did  a  gentleness,  a  forbearance,  a  kindly 
friendliness,  a  warm  recognition  of  the  honour  paid 
him  by  his  countrymen,  ever  since  the  Apologia  had 
broken  down  the  prejudices  which  had  prevented 
Englishmen  from  doing  him  justice.  As  with  his 
chief  antagonist  at  Oxford,  Dr.  Hawkins,  advancing 
years  brought  with  them  increasing  gentleness,  and 
generosity,  and  courtesy.  But  through  all  this  there 
was  perceptible   to   those   who  watched   a  pathetic 


478  CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  COURSE  xxx 

yearning  for  something  which  was  not  to  be  had  :  a 
sense,  resigned — for  so  it  was  ordered — but  deep  and 
piercing,  how  far,  not  some  of  us,  but  all  of  us,  are 
from  the  life  of  the  New  Testament :  how  much 
there  is  for  religion  to  do,  and  how  little  there  seems 
to  be  to  do  it. 


XXXI 
CARDINAL    NEWMAN'S    NATURALNESS^ 

Every  one  feels  what  is  meant  when  we  speak  of  a 
person's  ways  being  "natural,"  in  contrast  to  being 
artificial,  or  overstrained,  or  studied,  or  affected.  But 
it  is  easier  to  feel  what  is  meant  than  to  explain  and 
define  it.  We  sometimes  speak  as  if  it  were  a  mere 
quality  of  manner ;  as  if  it  belonged  to  the  outside 
show  of  things,  and  denoted  the  atmosphere,  clear 
and  transparent,  through  which  they  are  viewed.  It 
corresponds  to  what  is  lucid  in  talk  and  style,  and 
what  ethically  is  straightforward  and  unpretentious. 
But  it  is  something  much  more  than  a  mere  surface 
quality.  When  it  is  real  and  part  of  the  whole 
character,  and  not  put  on  from  time  to  time  for  effect, 
it  reaches  a  long  way  down  to  what  is  deepest  and 
most  significant  in  a  man's  moral  nature.  It  is  con- 
nected with  the  sense  of  truth,  with  honest  self-judg- 
ment, with  habits  of  self-discipline,  with  the  repression 
of  vanity,  pride,  egotism.  It  has  no  doubt  to  do  with 
good  taste  and  good  manners,  but  it  has  as  much 

1  Guardian,  20th  August  1890. 


480        CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  NATURALNESS      xxxi 

to  do  with  good  morals — with  the  resolute  habit  of 
veracity  with  oneself — with  the  obstinate  preference  for 
reality  over  show,  however  tempting — with  the  whole- 
some power  of  being  able  to  think  little  about  oneself. 
It  is  common  to  speak  of  the  naturalness  and  ease 
of  Cardinal  Newman's  style  in  writing.  It  is,  of 
course,  the  first  thing  that  attracts  notice  when  we 
open  one  of  his  books ;  and  there  are  people  who 
think  it  bald  and  thin  and  dry.  They  look  out  for 
longer  words,  and  grander  phrases,  and  more  involved 
constructions,  and  neater  epigrams.  They  expect  a 
great  theme  to  be  treated  with  more  pomp  and 
majesty,  and  they  are  disappointed.  But  the  majority 
of  English  readers  seem  to  be  agreed  in  recognising 
the  beauty  and  transparent  flow  of  his  language,  which 
matches  the  best  French  writing  in  rendering  with 
sureness  and  without  effort  the  thought  of  the  writer. 
But  what  is  more  interesting  than  even  the  formation 
of  such  a  style — a  work,  we  may  be  sure,  not  accom- 
plished without  much  labour — is  the  man  behind  the 
style.  For  the  man  and  the  style  are  one  in  this 
perfect  naturalness  and  ease.  Any  one  who  has 
watched  at  all  carefully  the  Cardinal's  career,  whether 
in  old  days  or  later,  must  have  been  struck  with  this 
feature  of  his  character,  his  naturalness,  the  freshness 
and  freedom  with  which  he  addressed  a  friend  or 
expressed  an  opinion,  the  absence  of  all  mannerism 
and  formality  ;  and,  where  he  had  to  keep  his  dignity, 
both  his  loyal  obedience  to  the  authority  which  en- 
joined it  and  the  half-amused,  half-bored  impatience 


XXXI      CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  NATURALNESS        481 

that  he  should  be  the  person  round  whom  all  these 
grand  doings  centred.  It  made  the  greatest  difference 
in  his  friendships  whether  his  friends  met  him  on 
equal  terms,  or  whether  they  brought  with  them  too 
great  conventional  deference  or  solemnity  of  manner. 
"So  and  so  is  a  very  good  fellow,  but  he  is  not  a  man 
to  talk  to  in  your  shirt  sleeves,"  was  his  phrase  about 
an  over-logical  and  over-literal  friend.  Quite  aware 
of  what  he  was  to  his  friends  and  to  the  things  with 
which  he  was  connected,  and  ready  with  a  certain 
quickness  of  temper  which  marked  him  in  old  days 
to  resent  anything  unbecoming  done  to  his  cause  or 
those  connected  with  it,  he  would  not  allow  any 
homage  to  be  paid  to  himself.  He  was  by  no  means 
disposed  to  allow  liberties  to  be  taken  or  to  put 
up  with  impertinence ;  for  all  that  bordered  on  the 
unreal,  for  all  that  was  pompous,  conceited,  affected, 
he  had  little  patience ;  but  almost  beyond  all  these 
was  his  disgust  at  being  made  the  object  of  foolish 
admiration.  He  protested  with  whimsical  fierceness 
against  being  made  a  hero  or  a  sage ;  he  was  what  he 
was,  he  said,  and  nothing  more ;  and  he  was  inclined 
to  be  rude  when  people  tried  to  force  him  into  an 
eminence  which  he  refused.  With  his  profound  sense 
of  the  incomplete  and  the  ridiculous  in  this  world, 
and  with  a  humour  in  which  the  grotesque  and  the 
pathetic  sides  of  life  were  together  recognised  at  every 
moment,  he  never  hesitated  to  admit  his  own  mis- 
takes— his  "floors"  as  he  called  them.  All  this  ease 
and  frankness  with  those  whom  he  trusted,  which  was 

VOL.  II  2  I 


482        CARDINAL  NEWMAN'S  NATURALNESS      xxxi 

one  of  the  lessons  which  he  learnt  from  Hurrell 
Froude,  an  intercourse  which  implied  a  good  deal  of 
give  and  take — all  this  satisfied  his  love  of  freedom, 
his  sense  of  the  real.  It  was  his  delight  to  give  him- 
self free  play  with  those  whom  he  could  trust;  to 
feel  that  he  could  talk  with  "  open  heart,"  understood 
without  explaining,  appealing  for  a  response  which 
would  not  fail,  though  it  was  not  heard.  He  could 
be  stiff  enough  with  those  who  he  thought  were  acting 
a  part,  or  pretending  to  more  than  they  could  per- 
form. But  he  believed — what  was  not  very  easy  to 
believe  beforehand — that  he  could  win  the  sympathy 
of  his  countrymen,  though  not  their  agreement  with 
him  ;  and  so,  with  characteristic  naturalness  and  fresh- 
ness, he  wrote  the  Apologia. 


XXXII 

LORD   BLACKFORD^ 

Lord  Blackford,  whose  death  was  announced  last 
week,  belonged  to  a  generation  of  Oxford  men  of 
whom  few  now  survive,  and  who,  of  very  different 
characters  and  with  very  different  careers  and  his- 
tories, had  more  in  common  than  any  set  of  contem- 
poraries at  Oxford  since  their  time.  Speaking  roughly, 
they  were  almost  the  last  product  of  the  old  training 
at  public  school  and  at  college,  before  the  new 
reforms  set  in;  of  a  training  confessedly  imperfect  and 
in  some  ways  deplorably  defective,  but  with  consider- 
able elements  in  it  of  strength  and  manliness,  with 
keen  instincts  of  contempt  for  all  that  savoured  of 
affectation  and  hollowness,  and  with  a  sort  of  large- 
ness and  freedom  about  it,  both  in  its  outlook  and 
its  discipline,  which  suited  vigorous  and  self-reliant 
natures  in  an  exciting  time,  when  debate  ran  high  and 
the  gravest  issues  seemed  to  be  presenting  themselves 
to  English  society.     The  reformed  system  which  has 

^  Guardian,  27th  Nov.  1889. 


484  LORD  BLACHFORD  xxxii 

taken  its  place  at  Oxford  criticises,  not  without  some 
justice,  the  limitations  of  the  older  one ;  the  narrow- 
range  of  its  interests,  the  few  books  which  men  read, 
and  the  minuteness  with  which  they  were  "got  up." 
But  if  these  men  did  not  learn  all  that  a  University 
ought  to  teach  its  students,  they  at  least  learned  two 
things.  They  learned  to  work  hard,  and  they  learned 
to  make  full  use  of  what  they  knew.  They  framed 
an  ideal  of  practical  life,  which  was  very  variously 
acted  upon,  but  which  at  any  rate  aimed  at  breadth 
of  grasp  and  generosity  of  purpose,  and  at  being 
thorough.  This  knot  of  men,  who  lived  a  good  deal 
together,  were  recognised  at  the  time  as  young  men 
of  much  promise,  and  they  looked  forward  to  life  with 
eagerness  and  high  aspiration.  They  have  fulfilled 
their  promise ;  their  names  are  mixed  up  with  all  the 
recent  history  of  England ;  they  have  filled  its  great 
places  and  governed  its  policy  during  a  large  part  of 
the  Queen's  long  reign.  Their  names  are  now  for 
the  most  part  things  of  the  past — Sidney  Herbert, 
Lord  Canning,  Lord  Dalhousie,  Lord  Elgin,  Lord 
Cardwell,  the  Wilberforces,  Mr.  Hope  Scott,  Arch- 
bishop Tait.  But  they  still  have  their  representatives 
among  us  —  Mr.  Gladstone,  Lord  Selborne,  Lord 
Sherbrooke,  Sir  Thomas  Acland,  Cardinal  Manning. 
It  is  not  often  that  a  University  generation  or  two 
can  produce  such  a  list  of  names  of  statesmen  and 
rulers ;  and  the  list  might  easily  be  enlarged. 

To  this  generation  Frederic  Rogers  belonged,  not 
the  least  distinguished  among  his   contemporaries; 


XXXII  LORD  BLACKFORD  485 

and  he  was  early  brought  under  an  influence  Hkely  to 
stimulate  in  a  high  degree  whatever  powers  a  man 
possessed,  and  to  impress  a  strong  character  with 
elevated  and  enduring  ideas  of  life  and  duty.  Mr. 
Newman,  with  Mr.  Hurrell  Froude  and  Mr.  Robert 
Wilberforce,  had  recently  been  appointed  tutors  of 
their  college  by  Dr.  Copleston.  They  were  in  the 
first  eagerness  of  their  enthusiasm  to  do  great  things 
with  the  college,  and  the  story  goes  that  Mr.  Newman, 
on  the  look-out  for  promising  pupils,  wrote  to  an  Eton 
friend,  asking  him  to  recommend  some  good  Eton 
men  for  admission  at  Oriel.  Frederic  Rogers,  so  the 
story  goes,  was  one  of  those  mentioned ;  at  any  rate, 
he  entered  at  Oriel,  and  became  acquainted  with  Mr. 
Newman  as  a  tutor,  and  the  admiration  and  attach- 
ment of  the  undergraduate  ripened  into  the  most 
unreserved  and  affectionate  friendship  of  the  grown 
man — a  friendship  which  has  lasted  through  all  storms 
and  difficulties,  and  through  strong  differences  of 
opinion,  till  death  only  has  ended  it.  From  Mr. 
Newman  his  pupil  caught  that  earnest  devotion  to 
the  cause  of  the  Church  which  was  supreme  with 
him  through  life.  He  entered  heartily  into  Mr. 
Newman's  purpose  to  lift  the  level  of  the  English 
Church  and  its  clergy.  While  Mr.  Newman  at 
Oxford  was  fighting  the  battle  of  the  English  Church, 
there  was  no  one  who  was  a  closer  friend  than  Rogers, 
no  one  in  whom  Mr.  Newman  had  such  trust,  none 
whose  judgment  he  so  valued,  no  one  in  whose  com- 
panionship he  so  delighted ;  and  the  master's  friend- 


486  LORD  BLACHFORD  xxxii 

ship  was  returned  by  the  disciple  with  a  noble  and 
tender,  and  yet  manly  honesty.  There  came,  as  we 
know,  times  which  strained  even  that  friendship ; 
when  the  disciple,  just  at  the  moment  when  the 
master  most  needed  and  longed  for  sympathy  and 
counsel,  had  to  choose  between  his  duty  to  his 
Church  and  the  claims  and  ties  of  friendship.  He 
could  not  follow  in  the  course  which  his  master  and 
friend  had  found  inevitable ;  and  that  deepest  and 
most  delightful  friendship  had  to  be  given  up.  But 
it  was  given  up,  not  indeed  without  great  suffering 
on  both  sides,  but  without  bitterness  or  unworthy 
thoughts.  The  friend  had  seen  too  closely  the 
greatness  and  purity  of  his  master's  character  to  fail 
in  tenderness  and  loyalty,  even  when  he  thought  his 
master  going  most  wrong.  He  recognised  that  the 
error,  deplorable  as  he  thought  it,  was  the  mistake  of 
a  lofty  and  unselfish  soul ;  and  in  the  height  of  the 
popular  outcry  against  him  he  came  forward,  with  a 
distant  and  touching  reverence,  to  take  his  old 
friend's  part  and  rebuke  the  clamour.  And  at  length 
the  time  came  when  disagreements  were  left  long 
behind  and  each  person  had  finally  taken  his  recog- 
nised place ;  and  then  the  old  ties  were  knit  up 
again.  It  could  not  be  the  former  friendship  of  every 
day  and  of  absolute  and  unreserved  confidence.  But 
it  was  the  old  friendship  of  affection  and  respect 
renewed,  and  pleasure  in  the  interchange  of  thoughts. 
It  was  a  friendship  of  the  antique  type,  more  common, 
perhaps,  even  in  the  last  century  than  with  us.  but 


xxxii  LORD  BLACHFORD  487 

enriched  with  Christian  hopes  and  Christian    con- 
victions. 

Lord  Blachford,  in  spite  of  his  brilliant  Oxford 
reputation,  and  though  he  was  a  singularly  vigorous 
writer,  with  wide  interests  and  very  independent 
thought,  has  left  nothing  behind  him  in  the  way  of 
literature.  This  was  partly  because  he  very  early  be- 
came a  man  of  affairs;  partly  that  his  health  interfered 
with  habits  of  study.  It  used  to  be  told  at  Oxford 
that  when  he  was  working  for  his  Double  First  he 
could  scarcely  use  his  eyes,  and  had  to  learn  much  of 
his  work  by  being  read  to.  The  result  was  that  he 
was  not  a  great  reader;  and  a  man  ought  to  be  a 
reader  who  is  to  be  a  writer.  But,  besides  this,  there 
was  a  strongly  marked  feature  in  his  character  which 
told  in  the  same  direction.  There  was  a  curious 
modesty  about  him  which  formed  a  contrast  with 
other  points ;  with  a  readiness  and  even  eagerness  to 
put  forth  and  develop  his  thoughts  on  matters  that 
interested  him,  with  a  perfect  consciousness  of  his 
remarkable  powers  of  statement  and  argument,  with 
a  constitutional  impetuosity  blended  with  caution 
which  showed  itself  when  anything  appealed  to  his 
deeper  feelings  or  called  for  his  help ;  yet  with  all 
these  impelling  elements,  his  instinct  was  always  to 
shrink  from  putting  himself  forward,  except  when  it 
was  a  matter  of  duty.  He  accepted  recognition  when 
it  came,  but  he  never  claimed  it.  And  this  reserve, 
which  marked  his  social  life,  kept  him  back  from  say- 
ing in  a  permanent  form  much  that  he  had  to  say, 


488  LORD  BLACHFORD  xxxii 

and  that  was  really  worth  saying.  Like  many  of  the 
distinguished  men  of  his  day,  he  was  occasionally  a 
journalist.  We  have  been  reminded  by  the  Times 
that  he  at  one  time  wrote  for  that  paper.  And  he 
was  one  of  the  men  to  whose  confidence  and  hope  in 
the  English  Church  the  Guardian  owes  its  existence. 
His  life  was  the  uneventful  one  of  a  diligent  and 
laborious  public  servant,  and  then  of  a  landlord  keenly 
alive  to  the  responsibilities  of  his  position.  He  passed 
through  various  subordinate  public  employments,  and 
finally  succeeded  Mr.  Herman  Merivale  as  permanent 
Under-Secretary  for  the  Colonies.  It  is  a  great  post, 
but  one  of  which  the  work  is  done  for  the  most  part 
out  of  sight.  Colonial  Secretaries  in  Parliament 
come  and  go,  and  have  the  credit,  often  quite  justly, 
of  this  or  that  policy.  But  the  public  know  little  of 
the  permanent  of^cial  who  keeps  the  traditions  and 
experience  of  the  department,  whose  judgment  is 
always  an  element,  often  a  preponderating  element, 
in  eventful  decisions,  and  whose  pen  drafts  the 
despatches  which  go  forth  in  the  name  of  the  Govern- 
ment. Sir  Frederic  Rogers,  as  he  became  in  time, 
had  to  deal  with  some  of  the  most  serious  colonial 
questions  which  arose  and  were  settled  while  he  was 
at  the  Colonial  Office.  He  took  great  pains,  among 
other  things,  to  remove,  or  at  least  diminish,  the 
difficulties  which  beset  the  status  of  the  Colonial 
Church  and  clergy,  and  to  put  its  relations  to  the 
Church  at  home  on  a  just  and  reasonable  footing. 
There  is  a  general  agreement  as  to  the  industry  and 


XXXII  LORD  BLACHFORD  489 

conspicuous  ability  with  which  his  part  of  the  work 
was  done.  Mr.  Gladstone  set  an  admirable  example 
in  recognising  in  an  unexpected  way  faithful  but  un- 
noticed services,  and  at  the  same  time  paid  a  merited 
honour  to  the  permanent  staff  of  the  public  offices, 
when  he  named  Sir  Frederic  Rogers  for  a  peerage. 

Lord  Blachford,  for  so  he  became  on  his  retirement 
from  the  Colonial  Office,  cannot  be  said  to  have 
quitted  entirely  public  life,  as  he  always,  while  his 
strength  lasted,  acknowledged  public  claims  on  his 
time  and  industry.  He  took  his  part  in  two  or  three 
laborious  Commissions,  doing  the  same  kind  of  valu- 
able yet  unseen  work  which  he  had  done  in  office, 
guarding  against  blunders,  or  retrieving  them,  giving 
direction  and  purpose  to  inquiries,  suggesting  expedi- 
ents. But  his  main  employment  w^as  now  at  his  own 
home.  He  came  late  in  life  to  the  position  of  a 
landed  proprietor,  and  he  at  once  set  before  himself 
as  his  object  the  endeavour  to  make  his  estate  as 
perfect  as  it  could  be  made — perfect  in  the  way  in 
which  a  naturally  beautiful  country  and  his  own  good 
taste  invited  him  to  make  it,  but  beyond  all,  as  perfect 
as  might  be,  viewed  as  the  dwelUng-place  of  his  tenants 
and  the  labouring  poor.  A  keen  and  admiring 
student  of  political  economy,  his  sympathies  were 
always  with  the  poor.  He  was  always  ready  to 
challenge  assumptions,  such  as  are  often  loosely  made 
for  the  convenience  of  the  well-to-do.  The  solicitude 
which  always  pursued  him  w^as  the  thought  of  his 
cottages,  and  it  was  not  satisfied  till  the  last  had  been 


490  LORD  BLACHFORD  xxxii 

put  in  good  order.  The  same  spirit  prompted  him 
to  allow  labourers  who  could  manage  the  under- 
taking to  rent  pasture  for  a  few  cows ;  and  the  experi- 
ment, he  thought,  had  succeeded.  The  idea  of  justice 
and  the  general  welfare  had  too  strong  a  hold  on  his 
mind  to  allow  him  to  be  sentimental  in  dealing  with 
the  difficult  questions  connected  with  land.  But  if 
his  labourers  found  him  thoughtful  of  their  comfort 
his  farmers  found  him  a  good  landlord — strict  where 
he  met  with  dishonesty  and  carelessness,  but  open- 
minded  and  reasonable  in  understanding  their  points 
of  view,  and  frank,  equitable,  and  liberal  in  meeting 
their  wishes.  Disclaiming  all  experience  of  country 
matters,  and  not  minding  if  he  fell  into  some  mis- 
takes, he  made  his  care  of  his  estate  a  model  of  the 
way  in  which  a  good  man  should  discharge  his  duties 
to  the  land. 

His  was  one  of  those  natures  which  have  the  gift 
of  inspiring  confidence  in  all  who  come  near  him ; 
all  who  had  to  do  with  him  felt  that  they  could  abso- 
lutely trust  him.  The  quality  which  was  at  the 
bottom  of  his  character  as  a  man  was  his  unswerving 
truthfulness ;  but  upon  this  was  built  up  a  singularly 
varied  combination  of  elements  not  often  brought 
together,  and  seldom  in  such  vigour  and  activity. 
Keen,  rapid,  penetrating,  he  was  quick  in  detecting 
anything  that  rung  hollow  in  language  or  feeling  ;  and 
he  did  not  care  to  conceal  his  dislike  and  contempt. 
But  no  one  threw  himself  with  more  genuine  sympathy 
into  the  real  interests  of  other  people.     No  matter 


XXXII  LORD  BLACKFORD  491 

what  it  was,  ethical  or  political  theory,  the  course  of 
a  controversy,  the  arrangement  of  a  trust-deed,  the 
oddities  of  a  character,  the  marvels  of  natural  science, 
he  was  always  ready  to  go  with  his  companion  as  far 
as  he  chose  to  go,  and  to  take  as  much  trouble  as  if 
the  question  started  had  been  his  own.  Where  his 
sense  of  truth  was  not  wounded  he  was  most  con- 
siderate and  indulgent ;  he  seemed  to  keep  through 
life  his  schoolboy's  amused  tolerance  for  mischief  that 
was  not  vicious.  No  one  entered  more  heartily  into 
the  absurdities  of  a  grotesque  situation  ;  of  no  one 
could  his  friends  be  so  sure  that  he  would  miss  no 
point  of  a  good  story ;  and  no  one  took  in  at  once 
more  completely  or  with  deeper  feeling  the  full 
significance  of  some  dangerous  incident  in  public 
affairs,  or  discerned  more  clearly  the  real  drift  of 
confused  and  ambiguous  tendencies.  He  was  con- 
scious of  the  power  of  his  intellect,  and  he  liked  to 
bring  it  to  bear  on  what  was  before  him ;  he  liked  to 
probe  things  to  the  bottom,  and  see  how  far  his  com- 
panion in  conversation  was  able  to  go ;  but  ready 
as  he  was  with  either  argument  or  banter  he  never, 
unless  provoked,  forced  the  proof  of  his  power  on 
others.  For  others,  indeed,  of  all  classes  and  char- 
acters, so  that  they  were  true,  he  had  nothing  but 
kindness,  geniality,  forbearance,  the  ready  willingness 
to  meet  them  on  equal  terms.  Those  who  had  the 
privilege  of  his  friendship  remember  how  they  were 
kept  up  in  their  standard  and  measure  of  duty  by  the 
consciousness  of  his  opinion,  his  judgment,  his  eager- 


492  LORD  BLACHFORD  xxxii 

ness  to  feel  with  them,  his  fearless,  though  it  might 
be  reluctant,  expression  of  disagreement.  It  was, 
indeed,  that  very  marked  yet  most  harmonious  com- 
bination of  severity  and  tenderness  which  gave  such 
interest  to  his  character.  A  strong  love  of  justice,  a 
deep  and  unselfish  and  affectionate  gentleness  and 
patience,  are  happily  qualities  not  too  rare.  But  to 
have  known  one  at  once  so  severely  just  and  so 
indulgently  tender  and  affectionate  makes  a  mark  in 
a  man's  life  which  he  forgets  at  his  peril.  - 


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MACMILLAN  AND  CO.,  Ltd.,  LONDON. 


PnncHon  Theological  Srminary-Swer  Library 


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